City Council Work Session — August 26, 2025

The time is now 6 p.m. and I call the work session to order. Will the city manager please provide a review of tonight's work session agenda?

Yes, thank you, Mayor. Good evening, everyone. Our agenda is as published tonight, so we're going to have four items in front of you. The first one is a presentation on the community survey results. We're excited to share that with you. We then have a couple different updates, one on the Platte River Power Authority organic contract and power supply agreement, and then also an update on changes that we have coming to our budget process and strategic plan and other related processes. And then finally, a conversation with you all tonight on the proposed tree preservation policies. So with that, we'll go ahead and get started right away.

I'm going to turn it over to William Bevel, who is our Communications and Engagement Manager, to get us started on the survey results.

Thanks so much, Kelly. Thank you, Mayor Arndt and members of Council for the opportunity to present our 2025 community survey results. Quick refresher, this is often we refer to it as our annual report card. It is a comprehensive survey that is conducted annually, as the name implies. and we use it as a key input for planning and prioritization work planning and prioritization so it does get used for budgeting for outcomes strategic planning several of the metrics that are in the community survey actually tie directly to our strategy maps which are the one of the metrics that the metrics that we use to track our progress on strategic plan priorities and the survey results are available online they're online now if you go to our website, fcgov.com. You'll get there. You can also search for it. There's a full report. CPIO provides consultation with city staff, leadership departments, and individual departments, and, of course, anyone that would like to have a deeper dive into the community survey results to learn a little bit more about what's in there. The survey is administered by the city's central communications office, and in collaboration with our partners at Polco NRC, the National Research Center. We're joined tonight by Sonia Widink, who is the Executive Vice President of Data and Insights with Polco. Sonia's gonna give us a walkthrough of the survey, a bit about the survey methodology, highlights, and some key takeaways. And then there'll be time afterward for questions, if we have any. So with that, I will turn it over to you, Sonia.

Thank you so much, William. As William said, I'm the Executive Vice President of Data and Insights at Polco National Research Center. I started with National Research Center 20 years ago as a researcher and have worked on many of the Fort Collins surveys over the year for air quality and some of the other departments. And I'm very happy to be here working with a government that does such great research and is in such an innovative city.

Okay. So your scientific survey started in 2001, so you have a great trend line of metrics.

You also have a history of using your data for performance measurement

and decision-making as William had mentioned.

This is the 16th year conducting the survey,

and the survey was sent out in April and May of this year.

A little about us. POCO provides tools to empower resident voices. We try to help make civil engagement possible online and elsewhere. And NRC is the research arm of Polko.

We started in Boulder 30 years ago and been working with you for over 20 years.

And we were merged with Polko six years ago to add technology to our quiver.

We are well known for our survey data analytics.

and we work a lot with local governments across the nation and participate in a lot of the thought leadership in the space with academics,

with city governments, county governments, and associations such as ICMA and NLC.

One of the advantages of working with Polko on your community survey is the opportunity to compare your ratings to communities across the nation.

NRC was the first organization to create benchmarks of public opinion for local governments. And there are currently actually about 500 communities in our database.

These benchmarks provide context to your results. And for your report, we are comparing your results to the national benchmarks. So that would be most of the 500. And then also to front-range community benchmarks.

And so those really help you just know what is just naturally high, what is naturally low.

And just think through libraries almost always are at the top of the list for ratings, and public works is usually a bit lower down. It's not really fair to say that that difference is good or bad, when across the nation that's what happens.

so how a survey is conducted really matters and we use our expertise to make sure that your results

are representative we sample our we use this we sample without bias over sample multi-family

housing and supplement the male sample with the city's outreach through multiple communication channels to reach more community members the survey responses are assessed for representivity

and they are statistically weighted to correct for common disparities, such as older adults respond in higher levels than younger adults

and higher proportions than they appear in the population. Overall, you had 921 survey responses, which is fantastic.

That's very high for communities. And the margin of error is plus or minus 3% around your results. The target for this type of survey is generally 5% margin of error. So that's excellent.

So there's a ton of information in your report, including cross tabulations by geography and demographics. And we can't cover it all here in this short presentation, but I want to point out

some main themes, invite you to take a deeper look in the report. And first, we're going to look at

your overall benchmarks. So there's 61 items on your survey that had comparisons with national benchmarks. 11 receives ratings that were higher, including ease of bicycle travel, natural areas, and open space and volunteering in your community. And three were lower. I'll point out these as we

go along and touching on the high and the low. 54 items could be compared to the front range benchmarks, and nothing was lower than the front range, and 17 items were higher. So that's a really great result because the front-range communities are pretty high-performing communities.

Now some key highlights.

Fort Collins is a great place to live, but it has not avoided the national and front-range trend of affordability challenges for housing.

Fort Collins community members continue to have very high ratings for quality of life.

87% of respondents gave you very good or good marks in 2025.

There had been a slow decline in this rating, but the 2025 ratings are closer to the pre-COVID levels.

The rating is similar to the national and front-range benchmarks. You'll notice with the 87%, there's not a lot of room to be over it.

about nine and ten community members gave good ratings to their neighborhood as a place to live

and this is trending up about eight and ten gave high marks to their neighborhood as a place to

raise children and about seven and ten said their access to everyday needs such as grocery shopping

in their neighborhoods was good or very good your neighborhood as a place to live was similar to

national and front range averages and other items were not comparable in our database

looking at other aspects of quality of life in the city as the place to live as the play a place to attend college and as a place to raise children all had very high marks quality of public schools

and the openness and acceptance of the community towards people of diverse backgrounds were better than both than the benchmarks as in previous years ratings for affordability were lower with fewer than two in 10 giving good or very good ratings to availability of affordable quality child care and housing. The availability of child care ratings were lower than the benchmark. But note that four of the ratings improved in 2024. Fort Collins is a place to raise children

or to retire. The quality of public schools and the openness of community all increased from the

2024 survey. An open-ended question was included on your survey and it asked respondents to identify in their own words one item or focus area that the city should work on over the next few years. Housing issues were the most

frequently mentioned priority by your community members. This was the same as in past surveys and also more frequently measured mentioned by community members were transportation improvements related to mobility, path, trails, and traffic, roads, and parking. The full resident comments are available in your report, and they are categorized or grouped in these categories.

So residents feel safe in Fort Collins. about nine and ten residents rated the overall feeling of safety in fort collins is very good

or good which was above the ratings for the previous three survey iterations fort collins

was similar to the front range and national averages for overall safety for community members

respondents were also asked how they set how safe they felt in various areas in your community

Nine and ten or more reported that they always are usually felt safe around the city during the day and in recreational facilities, parks, and open space.

Their neighborhood at night was also considered safe by 88%.

And a good majority, about seven and ten, felt safe in downtown and across the city at night and as well while using the transport max.

These last three ratings also improved by a large amount from 2024.

Residents rated several aspects of safety related services in the city. And at the top was natural areas and park ranger services, EMS fire services overall, and EMS response time.

Emergency preparedness was above the front range benchmark.

Lower rated on this chart were police services with about half of the community members giving good or very good ratings.

Most items were similar to other communities, but police services overall were similar to the front range and lower than national benchmarks.

Traffic enforcement was lower rated, but similar to benchmarks and trending up from 2024. Also trending up was crime prevention.

People like to bike in Fort Collins, and it's a good place to bike. as in previous years ease of travel by bicycle was a top rated transportation item with 85 rating it positively exceeding both the front range and national benchmark the northern colorado regional airport shuttle service ease of walking and street maintenance were also well rated by two-thirds of respondents and street maintenance was above both benchmarks while only four and ten gave positive ratings to public transportation it was above the front range benchmark and lowest rated but trending up was electrical vehicle charging availability and traffic flow as you can see on the slide safety from motor vehicle accidents when walking or biking or using public transportation is a new metric in 2025 with 50 54 saying it was good

Yeah, that was a new question and that's something to point out is that we do review the questions in the community survey every year to ensure there's still their validity. This one was actually added specifically in connection with measuring our performance around Vision Zero and developed in consultation with FC MOVES and our transportation departments. So that's why there's no data for this one for previous years. Thank you.

There were some improvements to transportation ratings from 2024 to 2025 highlighted here.

All of them are an improvement and then the top four are very large improvements.

So they're extra highlighted.

So the ones in the box are street maintenance,

the airport shuttle service,

ease of traveling by public transportation,

and the availability of electrical vehicle charging stations. So those were really strong increases over the past year.

folks like to work in fort collins but they wish there were more opportunities to do so

about three quarters of residents rated fort collins favorably as a place to work which was an improvement from 2024 the city ranked higher than the front range benchmark on this metric and similar to the national benchmark

Looking at a few aspects of economic health, all ratings were mostly on par between 2023 and 2024.

Availability of quality health care and quality shopping opportunities were better than the front range and national benchmarks. Dining opportunities and the quality of entertainment opportunities were similar to the benchmark.

and the availability of job opportunities was the lowest rating with about one-third saying it was very good or good

This was similar to concerns in other communities

Additionally community Community members evaluated the city's performance in supporting local businesses and promoting economic health.

Just over 5 in 10 survey respondents gave positive ratings for the city's support of businesses, while slightly lower proportion rated the city's effort to promote economic health as very good or good.

The ratings for business support was consistent with 2024 results, stabilizing after an earlier downward trend.

and the ratings for economic promotion showed an improvement over the last year after a few years' decline.

The survey showed that city employees do good work and that it is valued.

About 8 in 10 survey responses rated the overall quality of city services as very good or good.

The rating was similar to 2024, but slightly higher than 2023.

city governance ratings were on the rise as well with the largest increase seeing in balancing

development and growth while maintaining the city's character the overall direction of the city

and listening to community members when comparisons could be made front the fort

collins was similar to the national and front range benchmarks topping this list was respecting

all community members and creating a welcoming, inclusive environment.

Well, the one of most concerned was managing and planning for growth, but this too has improved.

Community members continue to give good ratings to both the overall quality and the overall

impression of Fort Collins Utilities.

as in 2024 just over half of respondents reported having contact with a city employee in the 12

months prior to the survey this is similar to communities across the nation and the front range

those who had contact rated aspects of their interaction and gave good grades across the board

all ratings were consistent with previous years except for promptness which improved by five

points year over year. Fort Collins was on par with the national and front range communities for the overall impression of city employees. The other ones were not benchmarkable.

So I hope this summary gives you a good sense of the high level of the survey results.

Certainly a pleasure to work with you guys. Such a data-driven organization.

Thank you very much. Do we have any comments or questions from Council?

Thank you. Thanks, Sonia. And thank you to William and all the staff as well. I just have two questions. One, with that plus or minus 3% margin of error, is that similar to previous years? Was it always around 3%?

I actually don't know the last year's margin of error, but I would assume it was better. It was as good or better.

okay yeah it's it's the same I believe it's last year's okay yeah and then this

will be a question for William or possibly for Amanda but I remember when I started council in 2019 that was the first time we saw something mentioned about survey fatigue and I was just curious how the city's changed practices since then and if that's reflected here or if that was just maybe a fluke that year or what's changed I can speak to that in really

broad terms with us going through in the midst of the digital transformation. There's a lot of new tools that we'll be deploying, including new survey tools. And so we're going to be looking closely at how we use each of those and making sure each one is fit for purpose. So I would describe that as where that's happening now, that that process was being something that we're doing now. So there weren't any changes to our community survey, to the way we delivered it, implemented it. And a lot of that is also intentional, is that we're keen to keep the data, be able to have those trend lines going year to year. We're very careful if we change questions and things like that. So the answer is yes and, but we could have a whole separate session to talk about survey fatigue. It is definitely an issue that we're closely looking at.

Okay, that's good, thank you.

Kelly?

Thank you.

How much does this cost in total costs?

I want to say the contract is for 40. I should have that in front of me, actually. No, it's not a quiz, just a ballpark. I want to say it's 44,000. I can find out for you, though. That's good enough, close enough. I just want to kind of get a feel for it. my main question and I've just got a couple brief comments and it's really important to me because I I'm married to somebody that does scientific surveys and all those kinds of things as part of her work and all that I don't understand how you can have an open participation link of 373 responses and rolled it into the scientific survey of 548 because I have a list of 300 friends and allies

that I could easily gain the system but choose not to let alone groups that want to influence something that currently exist in town and it doesn't make them bad or wrong that want to gain that so I'd either

want results but you might not have enough in the 373 not combining with a 548 to have the margin of error but I just flat out don't get rolling non scientific into the scientific and calling it a scientific survey I I just

want legitimacy and things and I question the legitimacy of it.

I'm definitely going to turn that over to Sonia to answer but I will just say I had the same exact questions when I first started working on this project so

Sonia you would speak to of course data. I have the same like we have the same concerns and we what we feel at Polco what we've done is basically we always do the random sample survey. And so we have those 373. And to be honest, like most communities, the 373 is what they get and what they use for their reporting. So we are doing that, that we know that that is the randomly sampled scientific survey. But you could get the same results from doing an open participation survey if your open participation is wide in the community and it's not skewed towards someone. So we watch for that. We actually before we blend those two results together We compare the results to see if they are different if they're skewed in some way And when we find out they are not skewed, I mean after we we also wait the we wait we wait both Samples before look at them compare them And if we find that the there's broad community representation as in when we compare items from the open participation to the sampled survey they are within a reasonable range of probably you know of like that plus or minus four percent then we use statistical weighting to blend the two we usually actually over um weight the probability sample but we won't blend them if they're wildly different so we're looking to see if there is something that has skewed your results. Because certainly, I agree with you. You can have one community group that has a passionate view of something skew results. Having said that, we don't really find that happens with broad community surveys. I would worry more about that if you were building a park in a neighborhood and there's like, you know, say people want more baseball fields, Maybe all the baseball players get everybody to do the survey. And, you know, that's where I would worry more about having a really skewed results. In these general community surveys, they're just really more broad based. And it's less of folks who have like an axe to grind or something of really strong opinion of the overall, yeah, of the topics overall. because it's a wide variety of topics. So those are things we do. So the reason we would still call it scientific is because we are still doing statistical analysis and weighting of the representativity of both samples before we blend them together. And then we're using statistical methods to do that blending.

I thank you for your answer and I just disagree. what I'd like to see and I'm only one seventh but the next time I'd like to see either both broken out and you wouldn't have to break them out

and I went through all of the whole categories because I'm as everybody up here pretty much a public policy junkie I went through and read the whole thing I wouldn't need the breakdown for every single category that you did in the back for both but I'd be curious not now not redoing it how they both compare because when you said something about well, you look to see if there are certain groups or something, but you wouldn't know, and I'm using a real list of approximately 300 friends and allies. They cross every demographic in this community. You'd have no way of knowing, but they could be of a certain political thing, or they could be coached, which I have never done, but they could be coached on some of the categories of importance. So I'm just saying the system can be gamed, and I'd rather stick to the scientific things.

That's just my own. Yeah, just to clarify when I said we look at the opinions of each group and see if they're different so like even if like we certainly wait both groups to be to match the census You know so this because in each group you get more older adults than younger adults A lot of people think in the open participation. It'll be a lot more younger people, but it's usually still skewed older and so we we look at those we weight them separately and we look at them and to see if there is a strong skew in the opinions so it's it's more we do trust the the scientific random sample more but we feel that if your community or city is doing a really good job of outreach then you can get a pretty broad sampling of your city and again i would i agree that like it could be gamed but it's just um i don't know that the um i guess the community survey doesn't have as much of a game to play i guess you know okay um just my comments on it i was real happy

to see that when asked an open end question um what's important the next uh over the next five years the environment came in second so i'm happy that although so the high marks of natural areas in every category. And then I guess my next one's to the city manager. I didn't know we actually used this. I'm happy to hear that we do because the concerns that came out

were on air quality, neighborhood services code enforcement, traffic enforcement, noise enforcement. The survey's words, not mine.

And enforcement seems to be an issue we could do. better in so how are you planning on using this is the next council moves forward with the budget and things what are what we've gleaned from this how do

you plan on using that yeah again the survey is really one of the important inputs as we go into our strategic planning process and then again as we do council onboarding that's information that's shared we'll see I think traffic is a good example of one that showed up as a council priority and then led to additional resourcing. So it is absolutely an important input in those conversations.

As was noise enforcement, which we're working on some here too. That's it. Thanks a lot.

Anybody else?

Thank you very much for your report. I'm sure the city, I know that one of the coolest things about the city is they not only ask for the data, but they use it and we see it in use all year long and especially with the budgeting and the match up to priorities and the priorities built on what the people want so it's a it's a you can rest assured when you leave that it's

it's not dead so we definitely use fort collins as an example of how to bring your the voice of your citizens residents into the planning processes correct so yeah we appreciate that

the partnership thank you very much thank you all for the time on the agenda and in your memo there will be some additional details I'll get that exact number for you thank you

thanks okay next up all right wonderful thank you um thank you again William and Sonia for that lots of good information in there we'll go ahead and switch out now for our next item related to Platte River power authority that both organic contract and power supply agreement Tyler Marr who is our deputy city manager and also a member of the PRPA board and Travis Walker, our Light and Power Executive Director, are here to present. And Tyler, I believe I'm going to turn it to you.

Yes, thank you, Kelly. Let me get the slides pulled up real quickly here. Good evening, Mayor, Council, members of the public. All right, that's working.

I don't know what this is. Okay. Travis and I are excited to be here tonight to talk about

two foundational documents that really define our relationship with the Platte

River Power Authority and tonight you'll hear Travis and I refer to Platte River

as PRPA Platte River maybe the whole name so we'll use those interchangeably but as you all know the Platte River is in the midst of a significant effort

towards rapid decarbonization that represents a pretty significant

transformation of how energy is both produced and delivered. So as part of that transformation,

really looking at updating the two documents we'll talk about tonight, both the organic contract and

the power supply agreement, just to make sure that those are still fit for purpose and best enable us

all to achieve our mutual goals moving forward. So I want to start with a diagram that I think is helpful. Travis and I will each explain more in detail. I don't know what the organic contract does and then what the power supply agreement does, but I think this is a helpful diagram that sort of just talks about the relationships. So the organic contract is an agreement that we have with our other three owner communities that produces Platte River.

Platte River is a product of the organic contract that we ask to provide us wholesale power.

And as a reminder, Kelly mentioned it, but both the mayor and I are the city's representatives on that board.

And our other three owner communities each also have two representatives on that board. Then the power supply agreement.

This is the agreement between each owner community and Platte River that says we agree to buy essentially all of our power from Platte River. And we each have nearly identical agreements. Travis will talk about that more in detail.

and that's important to protect ourselves from each other, if you will. So we'll dive in first to the organic contract. So a little bit more of the organic contract.

Again, there's four parties in the agreement. Platte River is not party to the organic contract. So we as the Platte River Board will not be approving the organic contract.

That is up to you all as the councils of the four owner communities. It is the equivalent of our charter. It is Platte River's constitution. and their governance structure. It's enabled under state law to join action agency,

and it grants PRPA a number of enumerated powers, including its bonding authority. And it acts similar to other power authorities that may not be public in nature.

And then, and I'll talk about some of these services,

we also are able to authorize Platte River to provide additional services that we agree to.

And that has evolved over time, certainly in the 51 years since PRP was created. Things like efficiency works and some of those items have been products of that sort of expansion of services.

Current agreement runs through the end of 2060, and that is a primary reason why we're here asking for the update tonight.

The board initially started talking about this at the end of last year, and I'll get into a more full timeline. But as we get ready to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to achieve that rapid decarbonization we talked about,

really having that signal both to the markets but and to each other as owner communities that we're in this for an additional period of time that is one of the primary reasons

we're undergoing this now and so you see that in the updates both the organic contract and

power supply agreement are proposed to run through 2075 with these updates so 50 years from when they would likely be approved this year. And then as it pertains to the organic contract,

we really used this opportunity to modernize language. I still, I think if you read and

council received a memo a couple of weeks ago with both red lines and clean copies of these documents,

there is a lot of things in there that were still relics of the era that this came out of, right? When board members were also staff members and people were serving roles both in municipal utilities in Platte River, a lot of those things do not exist anymore. And the board had officers that are now full-time PRPA staff members. And so a lot of the changes really clarify the board's

role as policymakers and staff's role in executing those policies, not dissimilar from things we have

in the city. But it's also really recognizing the shift in the industry, like participation in an organized market. And so some of those things are designed to be flexible moving forward as we really can't predict exactly what the next decade of continued transition in this moment might look like. And then in that vein of flexibility, I mentioned the product offerings. Rather than listing out specific things, there are some modifications in the organic contract that are designed to enable us, especially moving into things like the virtual power plant and incentive things. um prpa is likely to own some infrastructure on our distribution grid we're seeing this with the lease the council approved last week um for batteries um that likely won't be the last thing

and so that flexibility really matters um one thing on the governance structure because i think there's a chance council will hear about this um that is recommended is a move to say that board

members shall be either council members so the contract says that the mayor of each community

will serve on that board and then right now it's at council's discretion we are collectively as

the board as we worked at these edits suggesting that be either another council member or a staff

member someone with a fiduciary obligation to the organization at hand yes that's true you're able

to do that so um that's your organic contract i'm going to hand it over to our director of light and power Travis Walker talk about the power supply agreement. Thanks Tyler. Thanks mayor city council

Travis Walker light and power director moving on to the power supply agreement as Tyler mentioned it's a they're different in that they're separate agreements between each community and Platte River so it's a bilateral agreement. Most of the terms are essentially identical for all the cities reflects each owner community's commitment to follow shared rules and as

we mentioned before the power supply agreement also works to secure the revenue bonds and you know assures our commitment to buy most of the power that Platte River provides and commits them to sell us the power that we need and And the revenues from that obviously fund all of Platte River's operations.

So the power supply agreement is what we call an all requirements agreement.

That basically means that they do supply nearly all of the electricity to each owner community. And we as owner communities must purchase nearly all of our electricity from Platte River. Again, it's for the purpose of knowing what their resources need to be, what they need to purchase and what they'll need to fund for their operations. There are exceptions to the all requirements agreements. Number one is legacy generation. So anything that was before 1974, I don't think we have anything involved in that. New small scale generation. So this one comes up quite a bit. Up to one megawatt or 1% of the owner community's peak load. For us, it's 1% of our peak load. were about 350 megawatts peak load, so we could provide three and a half megawatts of power. That is generation from light and power and the city itself. So not to be confused with net metered energy in which any customer can use batteries, solar, I think up to 200% of their generation on an annual basis to, you know, sell power to us or use that power for themselves and offset their costs.

As an example, Riverside is around 500 kilowatts, so a half a megawatt. We could do up to six Riversides. So we're not there. We've got some flexibility in there already.

and in some theories our load will continue to rise as we electrify so we think we have some room to grow there if we wanted to again net metered energy

any customer can can you know we encourage them to do solar we're going to continue to encourage battery installations to go along with solar and

those different kinds of distributed energy resources thermostats hot water

heaters, that kind of stuff.

So I think right now we can provide on some summer days 39 megawatts of distributed generation.

So all that solar out there makes a difference. That's around six distribution circuits operating. So it's a real thing.

Just some bullet points, kind of similar to the organic contract. It updates recitals. It does replace some detailed carve-out items with a more broader commitment and terms to shared efforts around reliable, affordable, and rapidly decarbonized energy. Modernized language, shift away from prescriptive meeting requirements around distributed generation. Most of the time, we talk about that stuff anyway in most settings. things. More flexible language that supports innovation. You know, what we're talking about today might not be a thing 15 or 20 years from now. It could change. It clarifies that the interconnection point, high voltage versus distribution. There will be times in our near future, as with the battery installations, where Plat River will be providing us direct power on the distribution system instead of through substations and that sort of thing. so that clarifies some of that language extending the terms supports that long-term planning instability as we said they need to know how many resources to plan for what to buy what you know what to plan to deliver to us it modernizes the net metering languages so it aligns with the current laws I think it changed from 120% to 200% in recent years and so that increases flexibility. Updates rate provisions to you know be compatible with organized markets and really does support efficient participation in organized markets which is another element that we'll need to go along with

renewables I think that pretty much wraps it up for the power supply agreement we'll turn it back to Tyler for timelines yeah so just quickly here

counsel so like I mentioned we have worked been working on this as staffs and the board since the beginning of the year and we're here tonight because we've reached our sort of final drafts for circulation and that's what was provided you a couple packets ago and then all of the owner communities will be considering these items for adoption in the middle of September. Once that happens, I think on our September board meeting, we'll be approving the power supply agreements as Platte River, but again, the organic contract is something that's between the four owner communities. So that's scheduled for your September 16th meeting. And with that, we also expect that the energy board who heard a very similar presentation to this a couple weeks ago will be writing you all their thoughts post their meeting this week so with that that's all travis and i have for tonight but we are happy to answer any questions and dive into whatever dialogue seems best great council

i'm going to start by saying thank you guys i think five of us showed up at the joint meeting between the four city councils the four cities city councils and that was a really good showing way for calls to begin to understand what types of

things we're working on there so I appreciate you doing that that's all I

really Kelly jam question so Tyler one isn't a PR PA groupie or is not or has not ever been a member of the board or was never allowed to be on the board because they might be annoying and ask too many questions or not be too compliant what would be that would be me what how would you summarize to say

people watching at home that people do watch generally generalists for what we're doing what are the three or four main changes to this that are significant but in words that people that aren't involved in this intimately would understand.

Yeah, I appreciate that question, Council Member Olson. I would say the first and foremost is to extend the agreement. Because we're going to be issuing long-term debt, financial markets do like to see these sort of re-shared commitments. And we do have a lot of expense to achieve to build new resources, both renewable and firming of those renewable resources to ensure that we can successfully shut down Rawhide Unit 1 at the end of the decade. So that'd be the most important thing. The other thing really is modernization, right? If someone were to look through the red lines, I think they would see a lot of consolidation of duplicative recitals. I think they would see clarification of roles, again, previous roles that may have been held by both a board member and a staff member that are now, because of the maturity of both the four owner communities and our utilities and Platte River as a utility, those are now separated. The last thing that I think is most important is these modernization and flexibility components that I think probably best represent the energy transition and joining an organized market. So in the middle of next year, PRPA is going to join the Southwest Power Pools, RTO, so regional transmission organization, West Market. That will be a significant difference now, from now where Platte River fires all of its resources itself and chooses sort of what gets sold and some of that balancing. That will not be the case once we join an organized market. And that has become, I would say, a mandatory component of the decarbonization efforts as utilities are having to join these large-scale markets so that you avoid some scenarios like we saw in Texas during a winter storm Uri. So it's got some flexibility and modernization to help achieve those elements too.

Thanks. And then I'll turn in some questions for you so that we can have the information before first reading.

So I won't take everybody's time tonight on those.

A couple I have and a couple have been given to me by residents. But I have two. One is, and again, I didn't go back and confirm this. And this is from someone that wrote,

in the organic contract, the requirement of the environmental goals...

State something like it's not only not going to be enforced, but it was deleted from the contract. Does that make any?

It does. There was a.

And why why then?

So previously there were multiple recitals, but the leading recital that reflects the 2018 resource diversification policy that the board passed essentially says that Platte River will go as fast and as far as they can towards decarbonization by 2030 with a goal of 100 percent decarbonization without sacrificing reliability or financial sustainability. So in city lingo, that would be affordability. Then environmental had its own separate recital. And for just the sake of not wanting to be redundant, in this instance, that recital has gone away, but that commitment and that resource diversification policy has not. So just the redundant recital that specifically then called out environmental responsibility it is still captured in the preceding recital that mentions that whole sort of the three pillars is how you'll refer the platte river organization refer to those

okay and this one's mine just two more brief ones um the others i'll turn in the the one percent

cap or up to a certain amount wouldn't fort collins normally if it was just us want more than you know the one slide with the one percent uh um that's okay to us or it is in part

because of what travis mentioned and travis if you have something to add please do but um it's in part because of that net metering thing this is not preventing folks from being a part of this energy transition so net metering is when a customer has their own solar their own batteries certainly future ev programs where we might call on your ev to provide power back to the grid we're working on all those things collectively as a staff and with platte river none of that is counted against that 1%. And so it really comes down to economies of scale. It's certainly in my experience is where is a dollar best spent? And many of us, I think, will be at a ribbon cutting next week where Platte River is going to ribbon cut over 150 megawatts of new solar capacity. Travis mentioned we've been working on our local solar program for a long time and are still shy of, you know, 40 megawatts in some across all the rooftops and VPP or virtual power plant capacity. And so those monies just are oftentimes better spent at scale. So right now we do not view it as a limiting factor to achieving our goals. Okay, great.

And then my last one is with several councils of different makeups, I might add, because almost every council is a little different makeup. 15, 20 years ago, recs kind of fell out of favor. So it's kind of a two-pronged thing. One, define what recs are kind of for people.

And then also, are we going to use that to meet some of our goals of aggressive purchase of wrecks, which don't really do anything for air quality or anything around here? So how does that fit into this new plan?

So from the city standpoint, and we have Brian Thal with us, who's probably better equipped to answer the accounting of these things. We don't have to go too deep. Yeah, we can provide things right. But RECs are renewable energy credits that some utilities or some groups purchase in order to qualify sometimes for things like LEED, like the U.S. Green Building Council's program. the city has a policy around. There's various things they can be utilized for. The city right now, it certainly, as it pertains to our 100% renewable goals, that is not a factor in how we're planning on accounting for these. I do think it's important to note, and we can provide more in writing, and there was a request out of LPT this week to even do a staff report on it that we're working on. But essentially, I think it's important for the community to know how the city as a consuming utility, because we're a distribution utility, we consume the electrons, we purchase them from PRPA. How we get to account for renewable energy is slightly different than how PRPA has to account for them as a generator of electricity. And so we'll go through that more during that.

So in the memo, you mentioned if they're going to be using that method more and how much and all that, just whatever before first reading then. Sure.

And bottom line, I don't think PRPA is planning on using those to account for things either. Okay. Thank you. Appreciate it.

Anybody else? Those are great questions, Kelly. Thank you so much. Yeah. I mean, I think the bullet points here, the three key exceptions, it's just so important because there is a widespread, just for the public, notion that somehow our agreement with Platte River Power Authority restricts individuals from having rooftop solar or their own generation. Just once and for all, that's not true. The only restriction is on the city becoming our own generator, which would be counterproductive because our generation comes through Platte River Power Authority, of which we have 48%. So once you get wrapped around that, and then we have the small community solar at 500 kilowatts, we've said, and those sorts of things, of which we could do what you said, like six more of those before we even hit the 1%. But it would be counterproductive for the city to go into our own generation when our generation, we have. It's called Platte River Power 30.

So if people can understand like our generation really comes from Platte River Power 30, but there's no restriction on local rooftop solar or other than that.

I just think that's a key point. Yeah. Anybody else?

Thank you for great explanation really appreciate is very clear

Great next up. All right. We'll keep moving right along as we transition once again. I'm Tyler and Travis. Thank you both so our next topic is one that again, we have talked about over I'd say the past couple budget cycles really of looking for some updates and changes to how we are approaching our city budget process and making sure that council has the context that they need. So Caleb Whites, who is our new chief financial officer, although because of all the budget conversations, I feel like he's been in front of council. Maybe you're going to get a record for the most amount of times in a short time, is going to kick us off. And then also joined by victoria shah and rupa venkatesh to talk about some of our other systems so

caleb take it away thank you kelly good evening mayor and council we're very pleased to be here tonight uh to talk about this future focused item and uh really to check in with the council at a midpoint in our work to make sure that um our planning to date is aligned with the council's goals and receive that feedback that you might have. I'm particularly happy tonight to be joined by Victoria, who is on special assignment to the financial services area, specifically to be a lead for this new budget process. And I'm very excited to have her in that capacity. And I think some of the things that together we'll be able to share tonight, hopefully we'll give the council a good picture of what to expect in the future. So while we're here tonight, following the last budget cycle, based on feedback from you, Kelly requested a comprehensive review of the current budgeting for outcomes or BFO process and to update and modernize that process based on council and staff feedback. One of the key things with this is the budget is the largest point at which the city operationalizes organizational priorities so that led us in this process to also look at the city's strategic planning process and the onboarding of the new council and rupa will be talking a little bit as well about that tonight in some of her slides so obviously very happy to have her with us the final thing that i will say before we go the next slide is there there is no magic in any budget process a good budget process does not eliminate having to make difficult decisions as this council knows very well there's always going to be more demands on the limited resources than resources available to meet those demands but in support of the council making sure that you have the information to put your limited resources to the highest and best use. Our belief is, and this is really my belief, that we're trying to work on through this process is a good budget process gives you the information that you need to be able to make those difficult decisions. So as Victoria goes through the presentation tonight, keep these first three questions in mind. As I mentioned, we are coming to you very much at a midpoint in our work to get your feedback and make sure that we are in alignment with your goals. And then the final question is related to the council onboarding process, which Rupert will speak to as well. Just in terms of flow for this evening, once we get through the budget portion of this presentation, we can pause and take questions and then move into the strategic planning and council onboarding portion. So with that, I will turn it over to Victoria.

Thank you, Caleb, and good evening, council members. So as Caleb mentioned, I'll be walking through the budget portion, and then we can pause for council input and move on to organizational alignment. We'd like to start by talking about feedback that we've received from our BFO process. So BFO, we adopted as a city budgeting for outcomes about 20 years ago. So it's a good time to check in and see if all of the things are still serving us. And when we're in these conversations, the thing that comes out the strongest is a desire for transparency. see and this is really interesting feedback for our staff because in an effort to be very transparent we published 1800 pages of narrative for our currently adopted budget so they are all available and online it's not known to me if anybody's actually read every single page but what we're really hearing from that is is not just transparent but for it to have context for it to feel digestible. Alongside that, that complexity can also be sometimes hard to stand due to specific language that we use. So it can feel a little jargony when we talk about buyers and sellers and enhancements and offers. So are there ways that we can adjust our language that's more meaningful to the broader public so that there's not such a steep learning curve when you're engaging with our budgeting processes. We also heard very clearly a desire to have more insight into the service levels that are being purchased with our ongoing services and some kind of context or information to help understand why that's the associated cost for those service levels. There was a future presentation on the future of budgeting. We heard from some council members, some curiosity about moving to a priority-based budgeting that was presented in that session and anywhere we can ease the burden on staff and still have a great quality outcome that's of interest to us as well the trade-offs is something that came up in both what we've heard is a desire for change and something that we want to keep that we've gotten from the BFO process so really highlighting and emphasizing those trade-offs and decisions that are being made as we're adopting these budgets

Level setting in our current budget and economic realities, as Caleb said, that's something that's not going to change with any budget process that we move to. This is from our currently adopted budget document. It is the different revenue sources that are adding up to roughly $900 million that we have available to fund our different priorities. Scanning this, one of the things you may notice is the phrase payments comes up for a lot of these categories. And payments are going

to be fees which are going to have an associated cost nexus and we can't necessarily shift the funding associated with those.

The most popular example of course would be our power purchase. When we have payments from residents and businesses for their utility bills, there's going to be the associated cost of purchasing and delivering power. Our most fungible or flexible funding source is going to come from taxes and within sales taxes for this slide that does include our various dedicated sales taxes which will have some restriction from the ballot language so our natural areas program in 2050 taxes would be examples of that but there's still a little bit more flexibility and there's not always a cost basis that comes with those but of that sales tax roughly 75% is what we would say is our unrestricted base amount so about 150 million dollars per year that would be available for where that money goes because this budget process moves us from sources to uses here's a snapshot by category expense category of where our currently adopted budget is going so you can see the energy purchase for plat power and that light green representing about a hundred million and other associated cost categories these will look different as well sorry these may look different as well for different funding sources so for instance as we move from the citywide budget to the general fund budget which can be from that general sales tax but also has some other funding sources in the general fund as well this is where we see the the bulk of costs and that we're assigning are going to be employee paying benefits, so costs that are relatively fixed over a midterm horizon. Of that $250, we talked earlier about $150 that was truly unrestricted or kind of that more fungible funding source. Here's a look at by department where that's going for our 2025 budget. So the largest recipient would be police services. And what we see very commonly for these unrestricted general funds is it will go to departments that are core governmental services that may not have other significant revenues or funding sources. So examples here would be police services and parks maintenance, which is reflected in community services. We also see a lot of areas that are leveraging this. It's funding with other funding sources. So planning, development, and transportation is often receiving quite a bit of grants. Capital expansion fees are funding many of their projects. And often there's a little bit of funding that's needed to unlock or leverage those other funding sources and complete and deliver the projects. We also see areas that generate their own revenue from user fees like recreation is currently about 70 to 75 percent from their own revenue generation. And contributing some general fund allows them to provide some adaptive recreation opportunities or fund access programming. As well as just open up the facilities so we can program them. The last category that we see here is really internally supporting services. So for instance information employee services here that includes our HR function IT department and operation services which pays the utility bills for a lot of our facilities.

And as we move to our next budget we are we're getting close to kicking off believe it or not.

So the red X is us here in late August.

We'll be kicking off strategic plans shortly because those those priorities and that information helps inform our budgeting process which will kick off.

Q1 of next year.

So staff has been working towards what can come next after budgeting for outcomes.

As we've done so,

these are our guiding principles which really do match up

well to a lot of the feedback that we've received. Additionally, they match up to the GFOA,

Government Finance Officers Association's best practices for budgeting.

So that's something that we have in mind and in sight as we transition our process.

So what comes next? Thank you, Caleb, for the summary that it won't eliminate any financial constraints by changing our process. But we have that goal really clear in mind that we want it to inform the decisions we're making and provide insights into those trade-offs. The 2027 and 2028 budget will be transitional in nature and bridge us to our next long-term process.

So we'll be moving away from the budgeting for outcomes process, but we do know that we will be using our existing systems.

We're not going to have any major IT transitions in that time, and the timeline and inputs will feel relatively similar. As we move towards 2029 and 2030 budgets, that's where we have the opportunity to incorporate feedback from this transitional process. And also as we adopt other tools, we may have more interactive opportunities for how we're able to tell our budget story.

And we also would have a goal at that point of linking each biennial budget into long-range forecasts. So we're not looking at things two years at a time. We're seeing how those bridge into longer-term objectives and priorities.

Since I talked about things that will not change, I do want to emphasize things that will be changing in this process or can be accomplished in this process. So as we move away from budgeting for outcomes, where we really had a focus on enhancements,

we'd move towards a process that evaluates all programs, including the base services alongside new demands.

BFO, of course, structured things, the offers and packages around those outcomes. Another way we can talk about why we're funding these offers is the motivation for funding them.

So is this something that is mandated, maybe by our charter or by the state, or is it something that's aligned to different priorities or values that we're trying to advance?

We'd like to move from that complex stack of intensive narrative format to a more simplified structure, and we have an opportunity to do that through streamlining and providing kind of more visuals and context with our offers instead of the lengthy budget documents.

As a high-level mock-up of what that could look like, on the left, you see one of our 1,800 pages of offers.

So you see paragraph, pretty dense text, not a lot of numbers, no visuals.

So you see a funding request at the top, and then it's really just talking about what this is purchasing, what that funding is going towards. This is also just talking about our IT administration services, so it's not providing the broader context of all of our IT support and investment. The mock-up on the right shows a relatively condensed narrative, but provides more context.

So instead of the two-year figures, you see more longitudinal information, which is showing you how the investment is changing over time. The table and chart shows you sources and uses, and it shows you the total investment at the department level.

So this is a example of how we can simplify, but hopefully provide better insight and context as we move forward. In contrast to the 1800 pages, we've got about 33 departments organizationally in our last budget, so you can imagine how that scales and simplifies.

Looking out further, there are of course more advanced options for interactive summaries and

visuals that can also help tell our budget story and bring our community along with where we're

going at our investments. So this bottom left diagram is actually tying together the sources and uses instead of treating them like they're different things. And it's also providing the scale at a glance for what's discretionary and non-discretionary,

and how that's moving into different departments or outcomes. So we can see very clearly, for instance, non-departmental might be receiving most of the funding, but a lot of that is restricted,

and a lot of the unrestricted funding is going to public safety. We have examples for how we can also talk about investments and scale of those in different areas visually, and then more context longitudinal over time to show changes.

And with that, we'd like to welcome your feedback. Great presentation. I'll just open it up to council. Questions? Feedback? Observations? Julian?

Great. Thank you so much. And congratulations, Victoria, on the assignment. I have a few questions starting with the what's changing and why slide.

I don't know if we want to bring it up or not.

But in the first row, it talks about evaluating all programs, including base services alongside new demands. I am curious as we chain, as we move into this new process, I mean, it's also going to be a culture shift, I imagine. So how do you plan to account for bias in the process? The example being if someone has maybe been around a while or they started a program and they have like a sense of ownership over a program, how is that going to be handled?

Thank you. So we currently do, in those really long narratives, link to metrics, and that's a requirement, is some kind of objective, measurable output that we believe is linked to the funding that's being provided. So we would still want to continue to leverage metrics, and we know different areas are going to be at different maturity levels for those, and they may have different nexus to the funding directly. So for instance for our asphalt street asphalt index. We know that's really well proven We can track it really clearly and we understand the relative investments of each letter grade that we may move up and down Where we may not have that information in some other areas. So we would all be moving towards that level of maturity Over time and that would also be something that we would gather feedback on

And that's probably one of the largest pieces of why we view the next budgeting process is somewhat transitional as As Victoria mentioned, there is a difference in level of maturity in data to feed into useful outcome measures for the budget process. Ultimately, having objective outcome measures is probably the best way to reduce that sort of bias. And that's a strong initiative that we hope to be able to push through the organization using this refreshed budget process.

Okay, great. Thank you. And then similar or kind of a continuation of that theme, the second row talks about the existing processes, offers built per outcome, and then going to a new focus of programs grouped by mandate, alignment to strategic priorities, and value. So I'm curious how you're going to define and perhaps quantify that value, and it may be a very similar answer to what you just said.

Yeah, I think it will be similar.

we want to be data informed as much as possible in our budget process while leaving space for there are certain things that are difficult to quantify that the council certainly hears community impact or community input on that are very valuable so you know what we're really looking at with this this focus is that you look at a core, okay, what are we as a government mandated to do by others? What are we mandated to do by the federal government, state government? What are we then mandated to do by the charter? Then what are mandates that we, the city, put on ourselves, either through code or council direction or other practices? And then maybe where is your flexibility on top of that. So that's probably one of the ways that we'll look at that. But I think to the extent we can, we're really going to try and use this process to drive useful performance measure data through the organization so we can provide you as policymakers the best

possible insight for deployment of resources. Okay, great. Thank you. And then moving to your questions that last slide um i do have a question it said uh what information would enhance the understanding of base and discretionary spending somewhere i missed what is the definition of base

spending yeah so actually that that's a good question and and part of that would be in what i was just describing a lot of your base spending are your core or mandated services i think there are a number of different ways you can define that. Mandates are a really commonly used way to look at that. There are other ways also to define core services around what are basic things that the community expects that the government will deliver. This is certainly an area where it would be helpful to get some feedback from the council, especially as we move through this process in the next two years to see if we are hitting the mark with that understanding of what a base service level of service is because there are a lot of different ways to define it and I think the the the goal with a budget process really is we want to have scrutiny on every dollar that is being programmed but there are certain core services and certainly there's different different definitions of that, but for services that a municipal government provides that are widely expected by the residents to be provided. So how do we then focus the conversation on, number one, making sure those services are running as efficiently as possible, and then number two, when you get to that more discretionary portion of your resources, how those are being deployed to the highest and best use. So I know that's a little bit of a squishy answer it is definitely something that those of us in the budgeting and financial profession here in the public sector have to wrestle with but that's something that as we evolve through this process if we can come to a really good shared understanding of what those base levels of service are for our government that will help us focus the budget process and focus your decisions in a in a more effective way so in that bullet point the

use of just the term base is meaning the base level of service period or is there

more to it so it would be the base there's not there there is no special

underlying meaning what we're saying I think yeah I think I just got confused with that bullet like is all base so it's a base level of service is all spending on that base level of service a discretionary expense or can it be other types of expenses like why are those two terms put together in that one bullet. So I don't know if you want to answer that tonight or if I would even understand the answer well enough to answer the question back to you.

So yeah I am we certainly can put together a little bit more comprehensive definition around what staffs thought processes there. But like I said, at a high level, it really is around, okay, what are the basic services that we as a municipal government organization are expected to provide? What are those basic services that the council wants to see provided? Basic services that the citizens have mandated that we provide through various ballot initiatives? And then where is the more discretionary part of the budget for us to be able to more easily tweak in our biannual process?

Okay. I'm going to have to think on it more. Thank you. And then the third bullet, are there priority areas where you'd like to see scenario planning? You kind of go into examples of level of service trade-offs, et cetera, but can you give me a deeper example of what you're talking about here? Give me an example of a priority area and what you would do to it for a scenario plan.

So a topical example could be affordable housing. We see a lot of calls for additional investment in that area. So what might that look like if we try to redirect some of the discretionary spending towards that area? How would that look over time? And what are the tradeoffs with other services that would be involved in that?

I think another one might be, and this is one that there's some work already underway on this. Again, as we've talked about, some of our cultural services areas, for instance, where there's a certain level of cost recovery. Is there a sort of policy level approach that you all would want to have? And again, what is cost? Cost recovery, what is user-generated fees. Fees in and of itself could be something that could be a priority area for us to dive more deeply into. So, again, I would say this is kind of like, as you all have been making decisions in the budget space, if you're like, you know what, it would be really helpful if we had a better grasp on X, whatever that is. We'd love to hear that now so that we can see if there's a way we can accomplish that.

Well, can you follow that up with what have you heard from us in the last two years? Like I know fees is one of them. We've talked about that quite a bit. Have there been other themes that you would think about applying to this?

I mean, I think level of service tradeoffs we hear, we don't hear outside of housing, maybe real specific areas in that. So, but I have heard a call from council for, again, more visibility into some of those tradeoffs. So I think, again, we're looking at level of service is what I would call that, trying to have more detailed information there. Some of it in the revenue space. A little bit probably in the cultural side, I think recreation is another place where we could do a little bit more of that look. So those are the things I've heard so far.

Okay, great. Okay, thank you. And now I will answer your questions, or really just one of them. So the top question, yes, aligned with the direction. I really appreciate this. i mean very easy to understand which is great so that's a good step in the direction we want to go love the infographics i think that that is always a great way to show large amounts of complex information um so looking forward to seeing more of that again on that second bullet i just need to understand more what the relationship is between the base level of service and discretionary

spending and then priority areas i'm eager to hear what other council members think but i would say definitely those things you mentioned kelly things that have come up over the last couple years as we stumble across them and have to make decisions about the trade-offs or um you know i think again like it's all the things tonight it's i love that we kick off with the community survey um because it really helps um look at everything through that lens what has changed over the last few years what hasn't so um yeah thank you so much

Great. I think Melanie, sorry. I saw Melanie. Okay, go ahead. Thank you. And thanks for the

presentation. I'll start with your questions, and I won't belabor it because I think Julie did a great job, but I am excited about the direction you're taking. I do think this looks a lot clearer for the public and easier to navigate. I really like that you're going to dive more into the continuing requests. I can't even remember the term that we use for it because I've only

been through the BFO once, but I know that was a big ask from us. And then I really would love to see those level of service trade-offs because I know with the budget cycle we're entering, we're going to be really needing to take a look at where we might be able to make some adjustments to fund the things that we want to fund. I guess what I wanted to share was a couple of my asks and my guess is that they are probably things that I'm not alone with and that you're considering, but I just wanted to ping them. So I would love for this budget process to do a better job of not arbitrarily trying to fit budget items into priorities versus being able to look at asks holistically. That's something I struggled with was trying to fit it to a priority versus just looking at how much money it's going to cost and what it's going to do. Does that make sense? Okay. And I would love to, and it looks like you guys are doing this, but just being able to see the whole picture of a budget request in one place versus, again, spread out across multiple priorities. And then the other thing that was difficult for me with our previous budget was delineating things that did have those dedicated revenue streams because they were being looked at kind of in the same document and same pages as something that's coming from the general fund. So for me, it would be very helpful to have that reminder of this as a dedicated funding stream. I understand where we were trying to fit them to priorities. And to me, I was like, I don't even understand what utilities is on here because they have their own money. So I would like to have them not be in the same conversation with the general fund. So those are my things as a new budget user this past cycle tripped me up. Do you feel like those are things that are in line with where you're going?

Yes, that does sound in alignment with where we're going. And I think if I could translate a little bit, what I'm hearing in some of your feedback is that connection between the sources of funding, use of it, being able to see that from digestible angles, like the example that Victoria shared with information technology, where you can really see a more holistic picture of how that department's budget works. So I believe that is very much in alignment with where we're heading with this process.

Okay, perfect. I just I love the the idea of tying every single dollar to a priority.

And I feel like the way we were doing it before made it very difficult for us to be really understanding where the money was going and be creative with shifting anything. And so I still want to be able to make that connection and make sure that I know how that money relates

to the work we're doing. But I just think especially with a tighter budget, it's the The more clarity, the better. And I really appreciate the efforts to make it an understandable budget.

And I've seen a lot of success in other communities with being able to have this view of the example we shared with a holistic department approach that you would see replicated across our departments. That's a very common way that budgets are presented. It's in alignment with the Government Finance Officers Association best practices for how to present a municipal budget. But that doesn't exclude then being able to present also other looks at the budget sort of in summary information that could do things like tie dollar amounts to specific council priorities or other things like that. So there's multiple ways you can look at the information. And so we're looking at not as an either-or but okay. What's probably the Primary way in the most detail we present financial information And then what are other kind of more executive summary looks we could show as well to give counsel a whole picture?

That sounds great. Thank you so much

Yeah, and I think Melanie may have touched on it you might have mentioned it but it seems like in the last the last time that we went through the

process there were these ongoing uh budget requests and ongoing and ongoing and it never seemed to me

that we knew why or when they would end and is that something that you're going to be addressing

so that there are other there are other requests that could come on board and the ongoing could just Go away.

So I know, and I might not be getting at the thing that you're specifically thinking of, but I know there has been some discussion around the term of continuing enhancement and what that means and some frustration at how that's played out in the process. You know, ultimately, when we look at the at least near-term financial picture,

to have additional funds available in the budget to be able to deploy for new programs and services

or enhanced programs and services in one area will almost certainly require a trade-off of resources from somewhere else. And that's why we really want to focus in the new process on that evaluation of

ongoing current budgets, what we are currently spending on services in the city. Are we doing it most effectively? Do we have good outcome measures to be able to prove that? Or are there opportunities to be able to redeploy funding to a higher and better use?

Emily, were you done? Okay, Emily.

Great, thank you. I agree with most things that have been said. I like the direction. I do like that we're moving to this evaluating all programs, including the base services. and I do like the idea of agreeing on what is our base level of service I think to Susan's like the

enhancement the continuing enhancement it gets really confusing um and then how long have we

been continually enhancing it and you just like can't remember over the six years I've been here so um like different language are we going to so I know that you said some things will be enhanced

but how are we addressing this language of enhancement continue enhancement especially

if it's like two-year enhancement ongoing so are we adjusting that language yes we do plan to adjust

that language um i think to the the point you're making and i've done um some pretty significant work in my career about this about is really being able to have that solid basis of your inventory of programs and services what the current service level at which those programs and services are being delivered, what measures are being used to see the outcome of funding, and then also then from that baseline, using that as a kind of measuring stick if there's a appetite or desire to enhance a level of service. What would that look like? What is the data-driven case for that higher level of service? Or opportunities where maybe our level of services is very high and we could afford to have a little bit lower level of service and still be able to very effectively deliver whatever that is. But that type of deep program inventory work and attaching levels of service to it is a multi-year process. We will not have that done ahead of the 27-28 process, but that would certainly be a goal as we go into future processes and to certainly have much more clear language, at least in past budgets I've worked in, and just tried to be very simple, current level of service, enhanced level of service, reduced level of service, and have clearly understood definitions that not only the council understands, but really every senior-level manager in the organization could articulate what that means. that is something that in my experience just takes some time to drive that meaningful change through the organization but certainly that's my recommendation on where I think we should go with

the process over the coming years okay and if I can maybe just provide a little bit of context for public who aren't involved in the process I think the intent it's just good to know that the intent of continuing enhancement was so that it wouldn't automatically be added to the base if we go back to base. So it was trying, again, to be more transparent and visible about where services were growing before it just became part of the base from that point forward. I think what the process we're looking at now will do, again, by showing more of a graphical and year over year, we'll be able to do that same thing in a much easier to understand way than what the intent of this was, was to provide visibility, but it just ended up getting very confusing.

Thank you for adding that. Yeah, I assume it was good intent. It just got too complicated to manage, I think, on my side. And I like this kind of multi-year process. I will say I just have a hard time with the metrics that we currently have. And so what I just want to make sure I'm hearing you say is that we will eventually be updating the metrics. Is that true? Because I just feel like right now you can link anything to any, you can link anything to a metric. and I don't think that's the point of a metric and also those metrics it was really hard to measure what are we making progress towards and getting towards something so when are we going to stop doing something but that metric was always like well it's tied to a metric so we should keep doing it but there was no evaluation or number tied to those yeah so I'm not sure I can give

a full answer on what will happen in every metric that we use in the budget process tonight. But I think certainly our goal is to the extent possible to really be able to lean into outcome metrics that objectively show the effectiveness of resources invested. And hopefully within some longer term planning, as we look at what are appropriate levels of service for us to provide, what are the indicators that we have reached that level of service and that we have appropriately right-sized a certain investment.

Okay. I think that's helpful. I'm optimistic and curious about how it's going to happen because I would agree with Julie that I would have some concern

about these service areas and departments wanting to hold on to their budget and what that's going to look like and how we are going to get to what is that base level of service and the appropriate level of service because I wouldn't blame them, right, for wanting to maintain that.

So a couple observations on that. And, you know, this is why I thought it was important that we level set it in this presentation around when you really look at the more and obviously there's different ways to define it. But the more discretionary parts of our budget, a lot of those costs are fairly fixed that we're using there.

And change, at least in my experience, and financial resource allocation is usually gradual and incremental. and also a good resource allocation process or budget process, you know, looks at what you have available. This is an organization that does have a lot of resources that are providing a lot of great services. So it's not always a question of if there's something that the city wants to do or focus on that we have to add resources to do it. Some of the question could be about is there current work that's maybe of a lower priority that we have the existing staff resource or something else that could be reassigned to that but i you know i said at the beginning there there is at least in my experience no magic in a budget process um you know not As we're moving into the 2026 revision process, and we'll discuss this at Council Finance more next week, it's as we're looking to balance the budget for next year. This is, you know, from my observation as a newer person here, a very, for the most part, a pretty well run and lean organization. Certainly in the state of Colorado, TABOR has forced most governments to be very lean in their operations. So, you know, it's important to temper. Yes, I think we have very high expectations for and the council absolutely and rightfully so has high expectations for what you as policymakers will get out of this process. And it's it's still a very resource constrained process. Yeah.

Okay, did you have something to add?

Just one other thing I wanted to add to that because, again, this is something that I think we're, I would say, even a culture shift within the organization. One of our development themes in our managers level is around business acumen. And so, again, it's, we are so devoted toward what are the services that we're providing and the benefit of those. And that's sometimes easy to articulate, sometimes not. But we haven't always thought through the lens of like, and what's the cost of that transaction? So again, developing more of that business acumen so that when we're talking about trade-offs, it's a little bit more apples to apples are some of the things that we're working on developing.

I think that sounds great. And then will departments still put forward budget offers?

So in terms of the specific mechanics, we're still working on the details. and obviously the terminology and nomenclature. I certainly anticipate we will have a, you know, traditional elements of a budget process that there are budget requests. I use that as a generic term that are coming forward from departments. And that's some of the more detailed work that we're really going to be doing this fall on exactly how that will look. Okay, great. Thank

you and then I think I answered both of I don't know I think but and then I would say for the third one I I will say that I think Kelly covered that the fees level of service and affordable housing or three that I thought captured from my recollection things we've talked about so thank you

Trisha thanks for all the great work and I have to say like I agree with a lot of what's already been said here tonight. Just a couple few little questions. I'm assuming there's other communities that are doing this work really well that we're looking to based on those infographics that we have on that one slide. Are there some that you would call out right now or something that you could include later?

It's a good question. And we've been doing a lot of research in that area. what we found at least so far is is there are areas of specialty where different cities are excelling but I haven't found one yet that's really putting it all together we'd like to be that city um of course um but we are looking towards best practices we are looking towards GFOA to help us understand those and they do publish special awards so they do a best practice and budget book award but they also do special highlights for specific areas and that's what we're looking towards especially for the areas that we've received a lot of feedback that we'd

like to see more significant shifts great i really like that um and i think an important part of um

the budgeting process is our community uh feedback and outreach and will any of that change or are we But can you do that in the same manner?

So, you know, really most of the work that we're doing on this budget process is the internal facing how the budget recommendation and optionality around that is developed and presented to council. Certainly in terms of the traditional public engagement that happens through the budget process, we wouldn't anticipate any significant changes there. I think as we move away from BFO there there may be some very specific tweaks in that but overall our goal is to be more Trans in transparent with the public obviously Victoria talked about how In our quest to be transparent. We've probably become a little bit confusing But to be more transparent and digestible to the public and certainly in terms of the direct public interaction in the formal budget process We wouldn't anticipate any significant changes

Okay, sounds great. And then, you know, I always appreciate the dashboards that we have.

Do you see a budget dashboard coming out in the future as part of all these transitions?

It's certainly possible in terms of a budget dashboard. Those would be most similar to some of those interactive charts that we featured on our last slide. what's uh what's trickier is measuring the actual performance alongside the budget because budget just tells you one piece of the equation so ideally we'd like to move towards budget and performance and actuals over time and in a way that links to those other metrics so you know what we said we would do what we did what we said it would cost what it cost

like that um and then for your questions again i i am in alignment with everyone he went before me so thanks kelly oh

thank you um i'm really glad that council members of council uh several members of council push for this change i think it's overdue i think it's great uh to look at things new ways and i think it will um it won't necessarily be easy i'm sorry i'm going to miss it um truly sorry i'm going to miss it but i think it's a really good good move we'll eat good things it'll be a little bumpy the first time and maybe a little bumpy the second but it'll be it'll be positive in the end this is the way it used to happen this is very brief so this goes back many city managers i'm not referring to any one person a man a budget would be presented to council with very little council feedback and then we'd be told there are eight hundred thousand dollars that council could jump into the pit there and and and fight over you're familiar with this method okay and and and that's the way and then when council started gutting the city manager's budget for their own priorities as they should then all of a sudden another two million dollars would appear to there's some smiles around the around the room here that magically would appear that council had another two million dollars they could do and and so that's where budgeting for outcomes came from to do a different way i didn't i didn't it's all based on a book it started in 2005 i was here and um i wasn't wild about it but i was wild about it that was going to involve the council more and that's what it succeeded in it maybe hung around a little too long but it succeeded in the council building a budget which i think and and that i think we might have done three some of this crew together i know some of you did more than that but i think we had a year budget maybe a couple two years i think it was our finest work the most collaboration the most compromise i think the results were good i think it was phenomenal because we were built in early by staff and they built in our in our concerns um there's compromise and all those things like i said it was almost a consensus budget and they were good i think it was our finest work and it's the most important work i think we do because it's an allocation as you know of time and resources and it's an indication of our of our values and I think we just did it well and in fact I think the last time and I may be off by a few people but I think I'm first and second reading the last budget zero people spoke and it was either one budget ago or two ago and there weren't many that spoke then and that indicates we got something close when no people show up to speak on the budget that you're doing the most important document that we do so i think it's great it's great that council pushed for it i think we've got the right team i think um uh we'll end well i've got one thing on the third one not referring to any city managers in the past but for a while it was a lot of things going into high performing government there were these pots of things and if i were here i'd be pushing less Less of the internal and more for impacts of quality neighborhoods, impacting the people, the air they breathe. They want the noise reduced for vehicles. They want more traffic enforcement. I'd be looking, seriously looking, to reduce all of the things internally under so-called high-performing government and look at outfacing things for the people that pay the taxes and the fees, et cetera. That's what I would be looking for. I like to do all this stuff, and I know you have to have people behind the scenes doing it, but I'd be looking for the outfacing things. Some have already been mentioned, so I just added a few more. So thank you.

Great, and I just have a few comments, too. I think that you're right. I always hear the budget is where your values are stated, But I always feel like pure procurement when you spend the money is where your values are lived out. So I do think that that might also be some small culture change. I haven't seen huge issues there or anything like that. But, you know, diversity and inclusion is one of our big things. You know, when we go to look to procure businesses or consulting services, not just the same ones we've been using forever, but look out for the, you know. I mean, that's just an example of what I always think about with procurement. Because we are, you know, we do spend $940 million a year. So where we put that matters. And it can build, you live out your values that way as well. So that's just more of a broader point. Then the other thing is just, I think, so critical is sort of what Kelly was talking about, you know, designing a budget with the eye of the resident instead of the eye of the city. and if I could make an observation over four and a half years I think that's that's something that I could be improved upon as always it is but so like on page 50 the question was thinking about the next few years what is the one item or focus area would like the city to improve on and the number one item was housing cost or affordability so you can think oh you immediately think oh well, we're going to subsidize down to the AMI and all that. But let's think broader than that, right? So utility costs and the tension between some of the rate pressure we're feeling with some of our current goals and, you know, those sorts of things. So think more broadly and holistically when we're doing the budget, right?

And then that would probably come into level of service and stuff like that. and that also matches up with the principle that you shouldn't be siloed which is one of the

probably I don't know is that an accounting principle budget principle or whatever

those are my comments besides that I would say yes

I'm sure we'll see that's fine those to think you're on the right track with number two that obviously will reveal over time. And priority areas where you'd like to see scenario planning. Yeah, I think this holistic idea, right? So it's just exceedingly hard for council when we get, you know, the new building codes with nine local amendments. You know, you come council in January, sure. Then you get, you know, the world-class whatever. Oh, absolutely. Meanwhile, my brain is like, this is just adding, adding, adding up for the resident, right? It's just cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching. So I think the priority areas I like to see scenario planning is take all those things that we want and add them up and see if it's meeting the number one concern in the community, which is affordability. Those are my comments. Thank you. Did you want to say something?

If I could just mention that this is really helpful feedback and it's great that we're at this middle point in the process and we are going to use this feedback. I will say to your comment, it's really underscoring the importance of the budget process is the best time to be able to make those policy decisions that have significant fiscal impacts. because you have the ability in that process to understand the tradeoffs of resource allocation. Because otherwise, I have seen in different organizations, you get into this siloed mentality where you want to say, yes, that sounds great. Yes, that sounds great. Yes, that sounds great. And then you get to the budget process and go, oh, we already spent all the money and then some. So being able as much as possible.

I spent the taxpayers' money for them by increasing all these standards that makes the house unaffordable.

So to the extent that really fiscal decisions can be consolidated into the budget process, that gives you as the policymakers the most insight into what it is that the government is doing.

That's great. Susan, did you have something additional?

Yeah, just one thing to add. And I like the direction that you're taking this because one of the things that I felt would be nice if we had a budget that was more user-friendly to the residents and to the public where they would participate. I think you mentioned that we had these opportunities for comments from the community, and it was basically crickets. And I wondered, is it because we did such a good job or was it because they didn't know how to respond or they couldn't understand it? And I think the user-friendly approach is going to be so much more inclusive for our public. So in that particular way, I really appreciate the new direction that you're going.

Great. Final comments from anybody else? Do you guys want to do...

Do you want to wrap up or do you want to? So we have a part B of this presentation. If we're willing to spend a little more time. I'm sorry. I was like skipping. But it's great time. Okay, let's hear part B. So we'll do part B if we can. Yeah, good evening, Mayor and Council. So that was really great discussion and good tie into our next section. So as we've been talking with staff and hearing feedback from Council about our budget process, we recognize that not all the things are going to be fixed. through fixing the budget process, what the mechanisms are, and there is a greater opportunity to take a look at our entire system. So from a very high level, this is how our city system operates. And the yellow stars that you see up there is where there are direct council action. So if you start at the top right, council approves long-term strategies like the city plan, and then short and midterm strategies like the citywide strategic plan. And so we're at the very beginning stages of taking a look at the structure of our citywide strategic plan, which really is the blueprint to guide decision making and resource allocations in order to achieve our strategic goals and outcomes that are informed by things like the community survey and council priorities. And so a really quick sneak peek into how we're looking at doing this refresh of our strategic plan is we're looking at ways to better align to our master plans. So council has approved things like the city plan, housing strategy, our climate future, our economic health plan. There's so many of these long-term plans. So how do we better align those plans into our short and mid-term strategic plan, which really covers four to five years? Another thing that we're taking a look at is if you go through our strategic objectives, a lot of those are issue-based versus action-oriented. So we are really good at describing what the problem is in our strategic plan. And then if you want to know how we are actually going to achieve those objectives, you have to look in a separate document, so the separate BFO budget document. And as several people mentioned here tonight, not everybody in the public knows that there's a separate document or these plans are even connected. So we're looking at ways to better tie in all these plans together. So there's one document that the community staff and council can point to. And then we move to allocating resources. And as Council Member Olson mentioned, this is one of the most important things that council does is allocate resources. And so utilizing those resources, then the city manager with help from others hire and retain the right people to do the work in order to deliver those services. And then we report back to council on our progress of how we're achieving those strategic outcomes as we move into the measure and validate stage. And this is where we would take a look at how we're evaluating programs. Are we actually delivering services to meet our outcomes that we said we wanted to achieve? So this is where we are going to be taking a look at metrics and data. And again, this is not something that we're going to accomplish completely in this next cycle, but something that we are working towards improving and getting better at. And then council priority setting is a really good example of how we adapt and innovate and how we respond to changing community needs. and council does this every two years and setting council priorities and approving strategic this citywide strategic plan and then that brings us back to setting the vision and strategy and so in order for council to be effective in this system this is why we do council onboarding and so we want to make sure that there's clear delineation between the council and city manager roles for example we want to make sure that we provide you with an opportunity for council to be able to work well together and also to work well with the city manager and key staff. During council and board, we want to make sure that we provide foundational knowledge. So this includes information and updates to our long-term or long-range plans. We want to make sure that council doesn't get into any trouble during their term. And then number five also ties back to number one in terms of building trust with the city manager and staff and also setting expectations as to whose role, who's responsible for doing what. But this also talks about building trust with the community as well. And then finally, we want to make sure that council understands what tools are available to you, including what staff resources are available to you to help you effectively serve our community.

Okay, so I'm not going to go through a lot of this, but this is just to give you a highlight of some of the things that we have been considering during council and boarding. So the first column is really geared towards new council members. So what are the things that we need to provide to new council members so they are ready to go on day one? And of course, this would be open to any council, even if you're not new. And these would be public meetings. So if folks from the general public are interested in learning these things, great. And then something we talked about leadership planning at the leadership planning team meeting earlier this week is doing potentially a two part council retreat. over two weekends. So the first weekend would be really focused on ground setting and going through our, you know, those foundational plans, talking about what we have coming up in 2026 and other topics that arise. And then the second weekend is, would really be focused on council priority setting. And we're not talking about full weekends, I should say. It would be like one Saturday and then one Saturday. Unless you all want more, then we're happy to accommodate. But so especially hearing the feedback from the last council priority setting, really making sure that we have enough time to get a clear understanding as to what the expectations are, how we're defining success and things like that. And then I just want to finally mention

that we don't expect anybody on council after March to be 100% ready to go and not have any questions. Onboarding is a continuous process, and it's not going to be done in just a couple of months, and staff is always here to help. And then finally, I just wanted to give a quick snapshot of what we're thinking about as we're going into designing a council priority setting process. So we really want to understand what are the critical issues that council wants to focus on in a two-year term. And that will help us set clear direction for staff and the community, which really helps us with the transparency and accountability piece.

And also to help tie in some of those long-range plans that council and previous councils have approved.

What are some of the things in those short two-year periods that you really want to focus and prioritize so that as we move into the allocating resources and budget process, we have a clear understanding of what those things are. And with that, I welcome any feedback. Great. Counsel?

There's Melanie. She was our lone swear in last time.

I mean, that's a cute picture of me. Thank you. No, I just appreciate the work you're putting into this. I think there had been a significant effort put in to help council members be more prepared prior to me coming on. And I just think it's building over time.

And I think the more folks feel like they're ready to jump in and be active members and actively participate in all the things we're doing early on,

And it's just, I'm sure it's gonna be very appreciated by people coming on.

I don't have a lot of notes. I think the topics you listed are exactly what we need to know. And like you said, it's an iterative process of asking questions as they come up. But just appreciate the work.

Trisha. Yeah, that all sounds great to me. Thank you to the staff and to Rupa in particular. I know you've been spearheading this for many years now

and you've listened to council feedback and it's just continuous improvement and it's great to see.

I felt very unprepared when I came on and was onboarded. I see the mayor over here nodding as well. I did say I felt like I was better trained when I started at McDonald's in high school

than to be a council member to represent my district of,

I think it's like 18,000 people. And so I really appreciate the thoughtfulness that you're putting into this and making sure that whoever is elected is able to be a really effective leader to represent

their residents and they're part of their district so thank you anybody else

susan i'd say the same thing when i came on board um um the previous tuesday i had been on PSD school board. And then that next Tuesday, I was on the city council. And it was, I mean, it was like drinking from a fire hose. It was mind boggling. Fortunately, I had Kristen Stevens and Ross Kniff on either side of me who were telling me, you do this and you do this and now you do this. And they were so helpful. But this is golden.

All I can tell you is to have had that would have been, it would have made it a lot easier. It didn't make it impossible to do it, but this is so much better and we did get onboarding

I thoroughly enjoyed that process of meeting the different departments and who they were and what they did But this process is just so refined. Thank you for thank you for doing this can be really helpful

Anybody else?

No, this is a huge improvement. I would only suggest maybe you put down the roll of boards and commissions in the early so that when they get to choosing, it was the same issue. We won't go over it. It used to go fast with spring elections.

Now we have time to onboard people before they serve. So it's a great improvement, and I think it serves, most importantly, serves the people better. So thanks.

Now we're ready for a break.

Yeah, do you want to have a break, 10-minute break, 15?

Okay.

We'll be back at 8.10. Thanks.

We'll start with our final item of the evening around tree preservation and mitigation. And Dean Klinger, our Director of Community Services, will get us started.

Thanks, Kelly. Happy to be here tonight to just give some really brief context before I hand it off here to Sylvia and Kendra who have a great presentation. I think just for council or folks following along with this, I think my context is just a reminder for council that the really big strategic tree work was completed in March with the urban forest strategic plan. So that plan, of course, you all know, thought very broadly and big about all things trees, initiatives, investments, policies, regulations, all those things. One of the next steps out of that plan was a smaller sliver of our entire tree work, which is improving tree policies. And council will remember, we actually had some pretty detailed conversations around that particular strategy that was really encouraging us to make sure that we were thinking holistically around improving tree policies in the context of other community council and organizational priorities. And of course, that is around the cost of development for sure, but also around efficiency and customer service for folks using these. So I really feel like this team has done a great job sort of threading the needle into these policies around saying where kind of both sides of that equation, where do we need to think about protecting trees, of course, and preserving trees, and can we do that better? And the other side, which is where users of these policies or folks that are working with us, where are we sending folks through extra hoops where we're not actually getting the benefit or outcome in our policy? So I hope that comes through in the presentation. I will just say, again, we're kind of now kind of dove down deep into the details of just one little part of our overall tree work, so I hope that context helps. And with that, I'm just gonna hand it right off to Sylvia great. Thank you so much Dean and

Thank you counsel tonight for this conversation And so really we just have a very general question for you tonight. What feedback you have regarding the policies we're gonna go through about five policies tonight for you and I'm gonna start with just a little bit of background on this work So much of this work has utilized these reports you see here including Some of the work within the urban forest strategic plan also behind this is Our adopted plans like city plan and the affordable housing strategic plan and also other plans that we've been working with Especially with the larger land use code project

We also know that our tree policies have been in place for a long time and they've served the community well We do have good canopy coverage across the city and the growth manager

area this map here shows the canopy coverage across the community it's not just about tree density but is about the community's leaf coverage and it's it's

significantly greater often with those larger more mature trees and so this is true as you can see in those green and dark blue areas is canopy coverage that

is in some areas greater than 25% and that's often in Old Town and CSU campus

I'll mention here that magenta those areas are where trees either have not grown to have larger canopy coverage Or are in natural areas where where we may not see trees even into the future

and So as we look to these tree policies as Dean mentioned, we're really looking to balance our mitigation requirements While supporting our mixed-use and especially affordable housing development and then we We looked at really as mentioned in that other map, the prioritization of protection of those larger trees, which is not necessarily how our tree mitigation policy especially is focused.

Neither is some of our other policies that we'll talk about tonight.

And so we have seen that these can really help to align to our city goals. but then one of our trickiest ones that we will discuss is our mitigation and balancing that policy again with our higher density transit oriented development so we have seen some canopy loss in those pink areas which are often our older trees and also in those areas where we want to see higher density development commercial and housing and so we these trees are replaced through our current policies and that is done well but it can take many years for those to create that large canopy that we see with those larger trees as mentioned then before we've tried really to balance these with council priorities as well so we're especially aware that our standards do have an impact on the economic health of our community this includes of course the creation of affordability or affordable housing, which does have an impact on housing affordability overall in the community. And then we will note, too, that trees are a part of our local economy as well. They're seen as infrastructure in our community. And certainly we know everyone does love trees, and they do make our city beautiful. And so I think those are some of the things we've really tried to balance as we've really tried to bring forward policies that will help to modernize and simplify and bring some clarity and more predictability in our process.

As Dean mentioned, we are working on several strategies at this point and have done a lot

in these areas, but we're working tonight on strategy three, strengthening city policies to protect trees, and again, that discussion with council on trying to balance that with

our economic health as well. And then with that, I'm going to turn it over to Kendra.

Great. Thanks, Dean and Sylvia. Again, I'm Kendra Boot. I'm your city forester. Great to see you all again this evening. So before I dive into the few policies that I'd like to share with you, first I'd like to talk about some of those existing policies that we have in our land use code.

The first one that I'd like to speak to is the tree and habitat protection that we have, especially in our natural habitat buffer zones.

And these areas have really supported existing and new canopy in our community, as well as supported wildlife and access to nature for our community members.

We also have very robust landscape requirements in the land use code, which you can see when you drive around town. We have a beautiful community. and through those robust landscape requirements they've they've really increased our canopy both in infill and greenfield developments the last policy

that I'd like to speak to our existing policy is a council you adopted some soil amendments and xeriscape and irrigation policies back in March those are those are wonderful to support tree health canopy into the future and we really appreciate that especially around the dedicated irrigation to trees all of these things

have really helped create this wonderful community that we live and work in however we know that our community is evolving and our priorities are evolving as well so through this work i will

say that staff has worked very hard to propose policy as sylvia said to this evening to simplify

and modernize the existing code and really tries to suit future changes and needs in the community so as I mentioned there are five different policies that

I'll present to you this evening the first four are relatively straightforward

and with minor changes to the code the fifth one is a little bit sticky so bear

with us so the first policy that I'd like to present to you this evening is establishing a commercial tree removal permit this really focuses on preserving larger trees in on commercial

property outside of the development review process so think about our existing commercial

properties that have mature landscapes and preserving larger trees on those properties

so this code would actually have changes in both municipal and land use codes and

we do believe that we can we can manage this a program like this without or with excuse me with our existing resources really what we're looking here for is additional conversation or looking for compelling reasons to take out trees over 15 inches in diameter on existing commercial properties it's

really an opportunity to collaborate with property owners as well as licensed tree companies to proactively save trees that provide a greater community benefit so the second policy that i

have for you this evening is around enhancing measures for tree protection during construction Again, these are minor changes in the code, but relate to updated signage or some updated or modern ways of fencing around trees that we're trying to preserve on a property. Really, we're looking for opportunities to get developments to take tree preservation a little bit more seriously. So if we commit to saying that we're going to preserve these trees, let's make sure we're doing some of that work up front to help make sure that those trees are successful.

This should not be super costly based on some of our analyses. and however it could have costly implications after the fact for that

property owner if they have to remove that proposed save tree a couple years

after the development is completed the third policy I have for you this evening

is that creating a three-year establishment period for street trees so along with some other recent code changes that we've made over the last couple years and some improvements to timing of planting for trees for example this is kind of that final phase to really help improve tree survivability on street trees so staff is recommending a three-year establishment period it's essentially a stop clock for when the street trees are planted and really what this does excuse me when street trees are planted so I just wanted to clarify And really what this does is create predictability for both parties involved, include the city as well as the developer. We believe that the city will also continue to get the outcomes that we need in terms of tree survivability in these developments with this three-year establishment period.

And what's great, I think, is that the development community will have a light at the end of

the tunnel of when they'll know when they're done replacing trees and their development currently there is no timeline so I just wanted to say that and it's very unpredictable of when the city assumes responsibility for those

street trees the fourth policy that I have for you this evening is related to tree mitigation but it's also another simplification of the code so for there's those three undesirable species that are listed there Russian olive ash and Siberian elm

and currently in the code we have different diameter thresholds for those species of what

they can be mitigated at what we'd like to do is increase all of those different diameters up to 11 inches in diameter and what that does is relieves developments of additional mitigation

costs it can also help make sure that we're reducing some of those monocultures that we have or these monocultures that we have in our community and just

overall help us improve the diversity of the urban forests long term so I'm gonna

pause there because I have seen some like furrowed brows as I talked through

those four policies to see if council has any questions or clarifications around the four policies.

Thanks.

Who was furrowing a brow? Just kidding. Do you have something, Melanie? I might have had a slightly furrowed brow, but you did a pretty good job explaining it. I think number three was the only one that I was wanting a little more clarity on, so it sounds like street trees, currently the developer is responsible for their health and longevity for an undetermined or like a an unclear amount of time and it would be three years they need to keep them alive and then they hand them off to the city at that point correct so what what it's

been for for like for a long time in the code or on the plan sets is that the trees have to reach

an acceptable condition until the city takes them over we know that it can take a long time to get

tree established in our community however some of these different things that we've put in place so far we're really starting to see an increase in tree survivability and so we feel like if we can create a more predictable code around this establishment period then that really helps make it more black and white for both the developer and the city okay i like that because

it just seems like before there wasn't a lot of clarity on the process and I imagine also that could potentially have taken more staff time if they were needing to have people just come out and do more of a qualitative review okay

thank you for clarifying yeah and it has been very frustrated I think they're

frustrating for many developers as well as the city to kind of work through that

yeah over the years Susan yeah I'm always wondering you're driving around town which trees are ours and which are not how do we know is there a formula we have this great

inventory program called tree keeper if you google tree keeper fort collins you can click on that link and it'll bring up every single public tree that the city maintains so you'll see a bunch of green dots on there and you can if you want to get really into it you can

click on the dots and see what the species is and they're all those details there's also a set of other colored dots on the map and there are purple dots that signify that are a part of the development process so those are the trees that this city has not taken over responsibility yet but we have issued permits and we're tracking them to make sure that they're reaching that acceptable condition

And then eventually we'll transition them from a purple dot to a green dot. So that was probably more information that you wanted but

I like the idea of the treekeeper I'm gonna go I'm gonna go visit but as just as we're traveling along is there is there a way to identify Like where they are on the parkway or something like that that would be our responsibility because I'm wondering too There are some that are trimmed and some that are not and some that are in better shape than others and I would imagine ours are the ones that are really cool, right? Because we're taking care of them?

In terms of ours is the city?

The city, yes. Ours, the city. Yeah, yep. Yeah, so all of our trees should be maintained on a five to six year pruning rotation.

So if you come across some trees that you feel like haven't been maintained, you should let us know. um but um yeah so you in tree keeper there's actually a little tiny icon on the right hand side that has a bullseye you can click on that and it'll zoom to where you are and you can see

if there are public trees in that area if you're driving along probably shouldn't do it while

you're driving but if you pull over kendra just real quick on my uh you can tell me if i'm wrong but i think susan um there are trees in the public right away that the city doesn't maintain so there are cases where the adjacent development is maintaining those trees so there's no obvious way to tell just by looking at where a tree is i think that's what kendra is saying that uh using our tree keeper is really the only way to figure out whether so i and i think this is true kendra that our access fort collins um uh if you see a tree issue and you report it through there our team probably will be able to go right in and sort that out whether there's a responsible party that's not the city or whether the city needs to go take care of a tree so another question that i have and

And there's a lot, I brought it up before, it seems like every time we have a report on trees, but there's a lot on Prospect and LeMay that was decimated of all trees. It's now, they just cut the weeds, it's blighted. It's just awful. And so I was wondering, does this fit into that at all, or was that the other time that you were here and we were talking about, if you destroy a tree, then you have to replace it by, or it costs so much. Could you just take a minute to see how we would deal with that kind of a situation?

Yeah, so these policies do pertain to that type of property, that commercial property.

In that case, that was a very unique situation where they had started the development process or the construction process, but then they decided to sell the property. So I'm not sure that the policies that we have today and the policies that we're proposing tonight would have helped that situation much.

But the policies that you're proposing. Oh, go ahead. I'm sorry.

Oh, no problem. I would just add in that case, agreeing with Kendra, is that in those cases, if that property were to be developed in the future. Then our tree policies would apply. So if they were to use the project that's already been approved and then built that, or if they went through the development review process again, then for them to develop that property, they would be required to plant new trees in that process. And so that's one of those where it's a bit of an unusual situation. But there would be other situations, I think, where some of these policies might apply to try to protect those larger existing trees.

That makes me feel better. There will then be some accountability, and that's what I was hoping for, to get trees back on the property. That would be cool. Just one other thing. When you were talking about, oh, where is it, undesirable species and ash is in there. I thought we had like predominantly all ash in the city.

Yeah, so we know that emerald ash borer is not going away, and we know that we have a lot of ash in our community.

So the goal here, you know, it does self-seed itself in areas as well.

So the goal here is to remove or take out some of those smaller species of ash,

preserve, of course, the healthy biggest ash in our community,

But we do have a monoculture so we kind of have to over time shift

The diversity of our urban forests to make sure it's more resilient over time

It turns out we're probably not planting any more ash trees, but aren't we exploring other species of trees

To plant instead of that. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we are no longer planting ash in

in in our city projects or on development projects, of course. And yeah, we have a long list of, City Park is actually a great example.

As our arboretum, there's over 220 different species in that park that are proven test cases

for diversifying our urban forests. So, yeah.

Anybody else? Kelly, your brow looks furrowed. Was my brow furrowed?

How could you tell? Okay, so I've waited a long time for this. Okay, four years. And so anything that I say that's less than complimentary is not at the two of you, because there's like 50 cooks in this stew. Okay? But you really clarified something, Sylvia, for me that I think was important. I had the same one on my list, that we don't want to kind of create, and that's not what happened in the lot you were talking about. I think they planned on developing that, but it could be easily gamed if you go in, have a plan, then just strip all the trees, and then all of a sudden, it's a vacant lot that's easier to develop. So if I understood you correctly, they're still going to have to follow that tree policy when it's developed there. That's a really important clarification, so thank you. On that, just quick questions here.

And when I said I was, I just kind of hoped for more, but I have some questions on the things that are here. Maintain the current level of the tree canopy, and I forget the exact number, 14% or something like that.

It's not very aspirational, so could you answer that question? And I know where we live. It's not Seattle when I read their plan today, which is like 34%. 34% so that's a different place Yeah from where we live but not upping it at all. Can you just put some meat on that bone?

Yeah, so I just want to clarify to around that That canopy cover percentage is an average across the city limits and growth management area So we have parts of our city where there is no canopy and then we have other parts even though I think the canopy slide said greater than 25 percent in Old Town or most of Old Town we have greater than 40 percent canopy so it really just kind of depends on the area that you are in town what I envision because we've had good tree policies over over the years people seem to take you know really good care of their trees in our community we are going to see the newer parts of town or 90s to early 2000s forward start to kind of grow into those 25 to 40 percent

canopy cover areas in the future. Does that help? Yeah, sure. On the other places Seattle and others have that you have to consult if you're taking down a tree of a certain size, say 15 inches or

greater did you consider that and why did you reject it so we are considering that to a certain level with that commercial tree removal permit what we found with some of those other mitigation policies is that they are very costly or you know would have costly for the development community The other thing that we heard through our urban forest strategic plan is that half of our survey respondents was really interested in more stringent policies and the other half was not interested at all. So we didn't really have clear guidance in terms of our respondents for the urban forest strategic ground around stricter policy.

but we don't really recommend or adopt policies just based on public feedback yeah so really what

it what what i should have said is that that um that sort of policy would need additional um just

work around to see if it can kendra i might add one piece there too i think you heard kendra say that we think for this commercial tree uh permit that we can probably do that with existing resources. I do think our analysis of saying if we were to find a process to measure, find every tree in the community over 15 inches privately owned, that's a pretty big undertaking, and then stand up a permit system that would require consultation there. So again, that idea could help preserve really large trees and could come at a significant operational bureaucratic cost. So I think that's part of the reason that it's not brought forward in these, in that balancing of the two sides of this equation.

Okay. And then I'm entitled to one completely stupid question every meeting, and I haven't got there yet tonight. On slide 10, it's currently there is no set period, depends on tree health and staff discretion as the SMEs, and then at no period or it dies there. What's the SME?

Subject matter experts.

There's a reason I didn't know that.

Sorry, I used an acronym. I shouldn't have done that.

That's okay. I didn't furrow on that one. So the three-year period, I want to follow up on Susan again,

because this is Mike Calhoun's in the audience. He's had 50 calls through the years from a council or not on the trees, because it's part of development requirements, say commercial, say prospect shields, which was going to be a wonderful neighborhood facility and became a cash borrowing thing on your paycheck

and a vape area, a vape store. But the trees, not Mike's fault, the trees along there,

once after the three years now, pretend that was the thing. But still, I've been told now those are still, maybe it's Rite Aid's, Walgreens' responsibility. It was Rite Aid's at the time. So the responsibility, even at the three years, doesn't end. It goes away from the developer, correct? So it either falls to an HOA or the owner of the little shopping area, correct? I just need some clarity. It doesn't go away completely, and it's not the city's responsibility.

No, so the tree maintenance, you're speaking to the Walgreens there at Prospect and Shields.

They quit watering was the history.

Yes, and so they, as a commercial property, they are responsible for watering that right-of-way. And then forestry is responsible for the maintenance of those trees.

They're responsible for the what?

Forestry is responsible for the maintenance of those trees.

But they're supposed to keep them alive. But they're supposed to keep them alive with water.

I just need that clarification because we're not the only ones here. We have a public and all that to know that, okay, so after three years, I'll live with that on the developer's responsibility. but the responsibility for establishing, but the responsibility does not end.

Because that was part, it was a big brouhaha in that development. And that was part of the development approval at that time by P and Z under a slightly different process.

But those trees were supposed to not just be there for the first five years, they're supposed to grow and be there. I just need a clarification, so I'll live with the three-year,

because that's probably fair and easier for everybody from the developer standpoint.

Okay, so the 11 inches, I thought it was circumference, so it's diameter.

So that's still a pretty good size tree, so you just really want to say farewell to the ash, huh? because they have real value there, and I'm having trouble. This is the part I'm having trouble on that. I get the Russian olive. There was a mayor one time that thought they were going to have to take the Russian olive out of their backyards, and we didn't really mean that when we passed laws on Russian olives. But my thing is these have value, but you're taking away all value, so I don't get that because especially ash have value even russian olives have value for bird species and so it seems kind of a human only element to this saying they have no value i get levels of

value why no value um it's a great question um i agree as a city forester that all trees have value

regardless of size. I think when we were looking at this at more of a holistic approach in terms of

in these different species, how we balance emerald ash borer, how much chemicals we're putting into our community to preserve those trees or save them from emerald ash borer, and just trying to kind of balance what we're coming across in those monocultures that we

have across the city. We thought that it would be just simpler to move it up to 11 inches to kind of weed out some of those trees. I agree that all of these trees have value. Kendra, I might just

add a little piece here. I think just making sure folks are understanding, you know, the context here, which is this is in the mitigation tree requirements. So for development, they always have our landscaping requirements that Kendra referred to before. So these properties will be planting a bunch of new trees. And so part of this is just saying, like, what is on a site there that is really worth incentivizing keeping versus where are we really going to put in the long-term canopy and commit to those trees? And I think in the case of ash, what I hear Kendra saying here is, like, you're putting in a long, you know, right now, my understanding, and I'm an amateur in this space, but that our ash trees are going to have to be treated chemically every year to survive damerald ash borne. So to specifically add a mitigation requirement here on a developer versus taking that opportunity under development to invest in the new landscape plan. And again, this is only under a certain size. So I think we would still say large ash above this number, 11 inches would still be a mitigation requirement. So again, it's a compromise or just sort of making that tough tradeoff of where do we invest in the long-term property where we plant from the beginning, the right tree in the right place versus where we try to save something that would have a long-term maintenance obligation if that helps and my thing here because we've worked on

this a long time and we'll be coming to a vote soon so i'm sorry one other question on this i don't know why you're treating ash the same as russian olive and siberian elm and especially 11 inch ash so why how did you get 11 inches because there's not going to be that many in town of the russian olives and some of those that are 11 inches in diameter but there's a lot of ash I planted my ash 45 years ago, and they're pretty good size, but, boy, 11 inches diameter, that's a big tree. So seriously, I need to know how you got the 11-inch thing on the ash because they have value until they're no longer there.

Yeah, so the existing code is 8 inches for ash, 9 inches for Russian olive, and 11 inches for Siberian elm. And in terms of just kind of balancing all the things that Dean had just spoke to we

And to simplify we we focused on that 11 inch diameter. I

Don't have to like it, but it's an answer. Thank you Anybody else no oh Susan again

Do we have we're talking about commercial properties and all do we have policies in place for private property? You know, in terms of protection of trees.

You mean residential? Yeah, residential. That's what I meant. Thank you.

We do have some protections for the trees on residential properties. It's through our municipal code. And it really relates to our licensed tree care companies that can do work here in our community. so it's not necessarily a policy around no you can't remove trees on your on your residential property it's more of just making sure that they have the proper insurance and qualifications to do the work and ethically do the work in in the city of Fort Collins so no regulation in terms of

of taking down a tree. Okay. Are we heading in that direction sometime?

No, we don't have plans for that.

No plans. All right. Okay. Thanks.

Anybody else?

Okay. Great. Go ahead.

Okay, I thought the fifth policy was going to be the sticky one, but I'm glad. I'm grateful for all those questions.

Okay, so maybe this will be even stickier. So the fifth policy that I have for you this evening is really focused on that tree mitigation policy. So as you'll notice that tree mitigation policies are really unique to the community that you're talking about. I will also mention that we never get the same development site twice

And there is no one size that fits all

So we'll talk a little bit more about these tensions that you can see there at the bottom of the screen But we really did try to balance these mitigation requirements with council's priorities supporting mixed-use and affordable housing One thing I do want to mention here is that we are seeing less greenfield development and more infill development

And as Sylvia mentioned earlier, our infill development areas have more of our mature canopy in our community. The other thing that I wanted to specify here, too, with these five policies is that this does not pertain to single home projects. So if you want to take down your home and build a new one, or if you want to expand your home or build an accessory dwelling unit or other building in your backyard, these policies do not pertain to that. However, they do pertain to our commercial development, so multifamily, mixed use, and our larger neighborhood developments.

So we looked at all of these different tree mitigation approaches that you can see up here on the screen and what other communities are doing.

As I mentioned earlier, what we saw is that this would just lead to additional cost increases for the development community. So we were really looking for something that was going to be a good fit for Fort Collins. where we've landed is really around keeping this proposed code a little bit more consistent with our current code but really working in additional predictability and flexibility as well as other opportunities to provide cost relief when trees are preserved on a site so on the left-hand side in the green box is what our current mitigation policies are we assign a value of one to six replacement trees for each tree on a site we also allow for off-site plantings as well as payment in lieu in the community for trees to excuse me for mitigation trees that cannot be planted on site on the right hand side in the blue is what we're proposing to you this evening you'll see that we broke it out by size class and we assigned a specific mitigation value to each size size class you can see there's a smaller value of one to two trees for trees that are 20 inches and smaller and then as you move up to trees greater than 20 inches that mitigation value significantly increases We'd also like to still allow for payment in lieu to occur, but we'd like to get rid of the off-site plantings because it's really hard to track. In addition to the tree mitigation requirements, we also worked in some reductions, as I mentioned earlier. So whenever a development community saves or a development saves, you know, trees on site, we worked in a 50% reduction of that mitigation value. We increased it for affordable housing projects to 75%. We also worked in an additional reduction for the payment in lieu fees. And I understand this is probably a little bit confusing. But there's whenever a development decides to do above and beyond the minimum requirements, say, silver cells under sidewalks to improve tree health growth over time, wider parkways, or double row of street trees, for example, those are examples of additional options to reduce your mitigation responsibility. so just a little I was instructed to give a little bit quick of quick math here so we'll see if I lose you or keep you here so say you have a development site has 130 inch tree on a site that's worth 10 mitigation trees and they also have 15 mitigation trees to plant due to other removals on site if they save that 130 inch tree then the development would only have to plant or pay for 10 mitigation trees for example all right so this is my last side slide so you don't have to listen to me talk too much longer but you know just wanted to speak to some of these the benefits that we believe come along with these proposed changes we're really trying to prioritize and incentivize preservation of larger trees with these code changes we do believe that we've balanced council's priorities around affordable housing and mixed-use and with that I think I will go ahead and turn it over to Sylvia all right Thank you, Kendra.

Okay. So with this slide, we just really wanted to show you some of what we worked through when we were trying to balance the tensions in this policy specifically. And so I think when we were, as Kendra mentioned, as we're looking on the left with our existing tree policies, right now it's simply easier to pay a fee to cut down a tree than protecting those large trees through development. And so, again, that's just that payment is easier than protection at this point, and we wanted to work on that. And then we did also look at options to dial this further to be more stringent in these policies. We looked at the appraised value. We looked at a couple of other things. We looked at policies that wouldn't have any mitigation reductions, and we did do some engagement with that, especially with our affordable housing providers and other consultants that work with our developers in the community. And they felt that that would have a significant impact on their ability to build new projects depending on how high the appraised value of the tree was.

And so we wanted to share that with you, that we did that outreach. And then we really landed with our proposed code changes that Kendra took you through with those mitigation reductions for different situations.

And so with that, those are the five policies that we're presenting and recommending to you this evening. We did also, as you'll see in your packet, go through several scenarios with existing development projects that had our existing tree policies applied to them and then applied the new mitigation standard to those projects so that you could see whether they'd have an increase or decrease. You can see some of those percentages are pretty high, but we can say that that was overall not a huge portion of the cost of their entire development.

But then we did see overall that it sort of averages out to be sort of similar

to where our policy is in terms of cost for those projects. But all those projects are very different. All projects in the community are going to have different tree configurations. whether we stick with our current policy or move to this other mitigation strategy. So we just wanted to talk about that. Everything's going to be different. It was just hard to plan for every one of those, and we felt like we sort of landed in a good spot there. So we can go through those or any questions you have on those tonight, but welcome any feedback that you have, especially on the tree mitigation policy.

Great. Thank you very much. Questions?

Julie? Okay. Thank you. Thank you so much for all your hard work on this.

I have a bunch of questions about this, and it's, you know, all coming from a place of, you know, we landed on large trees for this, but large trees are sometimes the ones that are going to be at end of life, right?

So even though something may be healthy today, 10, 20 years from now, it could be at the end of its life. And perhaps you've just stopped 10 housing units from being built that could be there for a century or 100 years plus.

So I'm really having some issues with how we're lumping all large trees together in this. Now, I don't want to discount the work at all.

And I know you guys did a lot of public engagement with the development community and specifically the housing development community had some feedback.

So I want to start with some questions about, you know, Sylvia, you said at the beginning we have good tree policies in place that have served the community well to this point.

So what exactly are we trying to solve with the, I mean, I heard a little bit about simplification, but to me, this just looks like another layer of complexity in the development process. So can you help me get to where you guys were thinking when you were coming up with this stuff? Not coming up with this stuff, like you were pulling it out of air. I didn't mean it that way.

Well, maybe I'll start and my friends can fill in the details. But I think I do think of the five policies, there's a mix there. There certainly is simplification in those recommendations, particularly around predictability, around acceptance of street trees, also reducing mitigation of our species that are not as valuable. So there are definitely pieces in here that I think would be captured as beneficial or more streamlining for development. And then they're balanced by some other ones that we hope maybe achieve better outcomes, like in the case of mitigation, but may not be more complex. So again, there's predictability in there, too. Kendra's describing like a forester would review a site and decide, based on their judgment, one to six trees of mitigation, whereas now we have it formulaically. So a developer could look and say, this will be my mitigation requirement. So we did try to move towards more predictability there, too. And then I would just say quick, I think the problem we're trying to solve, again, is better policies for everyone. So trying to find that space where where do we have policies right now that are taking staff time or costing developers and are not helping us meet those objectives on trees. So some improvements there and then also more targeted to say, in some cases, can we save more large trees with a more focused policy that does that? And again, I think, yeah, your point about aging trees is good. Kendra, you might think about that one a little bit. But I would also say, you know, this does this is a very time sensitive policy. So just this idea that, like, you have a tree that might be 30 or 40 years old, it might have 30 or 40 or 50 more years of life. And, yes, we would plant 30 or 40 new trees in that development, but you're starting over on the canopy. So how do we just sort of blend that outcome to try to keep particular bigger trees if we can? And just one more quick thing I would say is that this does not prohibit a developer from taking down those big trees, right? So those big ones have a higher mitigation value, probably a higher cost, but it doesn't mean if the choice is really, you know, 30 units of housing or a tree, they will have to mitigate, but they could still take it down. So I hope that helps a little maybe.

Yeah, it does a little. I think, let me walk through the five and my questions on each one, and that might help too. So starting with the commercial tree removal permit, so you're looking at this to be outside of the development process, but within the development process, there's also the tree mitigation plan. How did the two work together? Does this add time and complexity to the development process?

The commercial tree removal permit would not add complexity to the development review process. These are existing developments that have already gone through that process, and really we're just trying to make sure that they're keeping their approved landscape plans compliant over time. Does that help? No. Then I must have misunderstood what the tree removal permit was.

Let me try a quick scenario for this, and again, if I don't get details right, I can be corrected. But I think if you picture a mature commercial development, your home insurance office, whatever it is, they have a tree that they were required to plant there maybe 30 years ago. Maybe this tree is 20 inches in diameter and big. And if they have, if they decide for whatever reason to take that tree down right now, they can just do that. And they don't need to necessarily justify the health and safety reason or other reason. So what we're saying is those trees are required from their original process. They provide significant community benefit and a very simple step that says, let's cross-check expertise with the city forester before they can take a tree down. So completely outside of a development process and definitely an additional step for being a commercial property owner, but one that is acknowledging an original requirement that they're still held to and one that has a community benefit. So hopefully, and this is a policy that we have heard in these council discussions. discussions. There's a particular property, I want to say maybe on LeMay and Stewart, is it maybe that brought this up in terms of like a really big, probably healthy tree that came down without a lot of coordination. And so there's a specific problem of like, maybe we can step

up a policy there. Yeah, well, that's actually a great example, right? So that was an old cottonwood. It was probably a couple hundred years old. I don't know, how long do they live?

Like they can't live that long, right? Yeah, I mean, we've got old cottonwoods that are 150 years old.

Yeah. Yeah. But it definitely wasn't the healthiest of trees by any means. I don't know what they're going to put there, but let's say they do put, you know, that is a perfect spot for infill development. So now you have, I mean, just off the cuff, 50 new apartments, that's 50 families that are not commuting into the community every day. So all of a sudden, like what's the carbon offset? And I know we cannot measure these things, but it's just speaks to the fact that all this.

This stuff touches so many different spokes on the wheel that when we try to pigeonhole trees by size, by, you know, I won't get into the types, but it's really difficult to make sure that we're making a policy. And you know this because you guys have gone through it, but that is not going to do more harm than good.

Okay, so thank you. So the second one, enhanced measures for tree protection. So how are you going to train inspectors to look? I mean, specifically the new King Soopers on college, those trees that they kept, holy, I don't know if you guys saw how they protected them, but they're not going to be there in a couple of years, I don't think.

Or perhaps I'm married to someone who knows these things looking at it that was like, that is not good.

So how is this? How does that play out?

yeah so we do have um staff that um that do in regular inspections we also have the forestry zoning inspector that has really been working hard in supporting um developments with better tree protection um there's still more work to do we're we're we're missing the mark on some of our tree protection standards and and that's why we're here trying to improve them a little bit

Thanks. Yeah, and for the next one, the three-year establishment. So I understand the intent. Like, so it used, it was, you didn't have one before. So it sounds like some developers were maybe doing five-year or in the case of the Walgreens, like that was just let go.

So what I'm thinking about some of the newer developments where you've got the trees on the right of way and maybe you have a landscaper that could care less. And so they weed whack the baby trees. And how is that the developer's fault? And how do we like how?

Yeah, so that it depends on where the development is at in the in the development or the construction phase. So it's not the developer's fault if those trees are being weed whacked. We've done a lot of education and outreach with the HOA boards in these neighborhoods. We're talking to neighbors that may be actually weed whacking around those trees. There are some code changes that we made in March around mulch rings, which is a maintenance implication over time. but it's significantly helpful to protect those trees from weed whacking, for example. So that is not necessarily the developer's responsibility to replace weed whacker trees unless they're still in that construction phase. And in that time period, they would have to replace those trees.

Okay. And then as a side note, do all of the landscapers that, I know there's pretty strict rules for tree companies that work within city limits,

Do we have those for landscapers as well?

Not currently. Okay. But, you know, some of the, you know, when we know who is, you know, got the HOA contract for a given development, we will actually reach out to those landscape companies and the HOA to help educate and help them understand. But it can be tricky. Okay. Yeah.

Okay. Thank you. Okay.

And then I don't think I have issues with for, again, I see it as,

yeah i do agree like all trees have value uh in very different ways but that has to be balanced with the value that could be put in place by say cutting down an ash now instead of when it fails in a few years and planning something new and giving it that time um and then i guess so did

you consider i know you talked about affordable housing but we know it's not just affordable housing that we're we have a shortage of here it's housing in general um did you look at possibly

treating commercial housing as different from other commercial commercially built projects and is that even legal

i think it depends on i mean it's how it's defined in the in the land use code up front and I would say no we didn't look at treating them them differently. Okay thank you. So for me for now and I think anyone who knows me and has watched me for six years know I am a total tree hugger and it's just very appropriate that this is coming tonight where for the at least third

or fourth year in the row the number one issue in our community survey is housing affordability which is as a direct result of housing scarcity and I you know we got a memo in our packet last

Thursday about things that are being worked on in the development approval process and I do not it seems to me this is adding another layer of complexity while we're trying to work through this process right now so I don't want to diminish the work done at all but as Dean said like this is just a sliver of the work. I know you guys have done amazing. Like how many trees did you just sell at the sale for $25? A thousand. A thousand. And that used to be $2.50, was it? Around that. So we've done a thousand for two or three years in a row now. Thank you to council for amazing. Right. And then one of the seven things you've gone through like this, I just feel like now is not the time right now when we're dealing with such a housing crisis. If we could separate other commercial development, I would feel maybe a little bit better about it. But that's kind of where I stand on all of it right now. I would love to know to, of course, with the people that have to develop using this code, how they feel. I know you've responded to a lot of their issues to this point, but I don't know if you've gone back for feedback with these proposed changes. And I think that would be super helpful. So thank you again.

Anybody else? Kelly.

Thank you. I still need to go back to number five before I get my closing comments.

Because you look at a piece of paper, I don't know if that's a 10 and a half or 11 inches, but then you add three. And your mitigation, this is on number five, for a 16 to 14 inch tree is one tree. Can you flesh that out before first reading if we ever get there?

I'd like to know what other places do because that just seems ridiculously low to me Anything tonight or you want to give it in writing later or what?

You know, I think here we were really trying looking across the projects that we reviewed We were really trying to get to cost neutral in terms of increasing costs for

development knowing that some developments were going to have increased costs around mitigation with these new or these proposed standards

and others were going to have a reduction in their mitigation

with tree saved so we can circle back around on that but anytime you add additional mitigation trees it increases cost and

another I guess another component of it is that we were looking at the size distribution of the trees on the development site and um on or across all those development sites and we are seeing um less large trees be preserved over that kind of 15 inch diameter range um and about 50 50 for those um smaller diameters um of trees the 6 to 14 inch so that i might have just

confused you there but um those are some of the kindred i mean i think that's right and i'll just

say clearly this policy is very specifically designed to be less stringent for smaller trees and more focused on big trees so you're just pinpointing the exact trade-off that we proposed

in this design so just we define smaller and small and larger differently that's fair i don't define

a 14 inch tree as small but in in this town okay the 500 for the payment in lieu um when was that

last changed we actually trans just transition to the $500 for payment in lieu a couple years ago before that it was like a hundred and seventy five dollars so we we had taken us a long time to make that adjustment to the actual market value to buy a tree and plant a tree okay the and then I'd like

some if it gets to first reading i like to see what other communities do kind of representative i don't expect 100 hours of research but you guys have access now with the technology today to

to find that out and then where does that 500 go i'm assuming it you then control where the trees

will now go it doesn't go into the black hole of a budget but it will actually go into trees being

planted somewhere yeah it actually eventually gets cleaned up and appropriated back into our budget And what we do is we use that to support tree planting across the community

Okay, and then I guess I'll just Get to the punchline then because I don't know if we're gonna get to the thing but an example would be On balance and I'm not even saying good or bad. I already said I wanted stricter things But on balance I actually view it as a weakening of the current policies

and For stodgy brewing for example, I've hung out there a little bit in my life under the current land use code $28,250 to 57 mitigation trees.

I'm assuming because they saved some large trees, they would have had under the current policy $0 and 0 mitigation trees for 168% reduction in their cost. So I'm not saying that's a bad thing. I'm saying that's an example of I'm assuming it's because they saved a couple large trees there. and that. So I was hoping I wouldn't have to get here tonight, but so here I am. Once again, I think we walk the or we talk the talk, but we don't walk the walk, whether it be pollinators, cats impact on birds, climate change, building codes, energy codes, plastic, in this case, trees. We talk it, but we don't walk it when it comes to doing policies, and I'm just incredibly disappointed and frustrated if that's where we go. It's remarkable to me. It's even more remarkable that we think not that either weakening or adding some minimalistic, sensible policies and procedures, that we think that's somehow going to, the inaccurate assumption that that's going to make housing more unattainable or less affordable. It's just untrue. There are so many market forces at work of the demand in a high quality, in-demand place to live, the continually dumbing down of city policies under the misinformation that that's going to somehow result in more affordable housing and at what cost to the quality community. The only thing that's actually going to get to a more affordable, more attainable housing If we continually dumb down our policies and then make it less attractive to live here, then it'll get more affordable. But people like places like Fort Collins are not really going to be the most affordable places on the planet. It doesn't mean we give up. It means we keep plugging away on both attainable and affordable and perhaps more funding in it. But it doesn't mean every time the word policy or regulation comes up or we're redoing things that we just think that that's just not the way to go. And especially when it comes to trees. It's just very frustrating. And I hope a majority council moves this forward because on balance, I view it as more pro-development than pro-tree. It just clarifies a lot of things. And after all this work, just really frustrating.

Emily.

Sure. Thank you. I did have a question about the table at the end with the changes. Which one of these is housing? I know Village on Horsetooth is, but I wasn't just from the name sure what other were housing.

I believe from that list on slide 28, tapestry is another affordable housing project. Okay. That has not been built yet.

So tapestry and village, and then is there any other housing just in general?

Oh, housing. I was thinking affordable housing. I'm sorry. Yeah, union on Elizabeth.

Yeah. Oh, Copperleaf.

And the granary. Oh, okay, great. That's helpful. Thank you.

And I believe stodgy is zero because they had such an overgrowth of trees that, I mean, they ended up taking out 50 and then they were still over their required amount and then they had to plant how many more trees somewhere else?

I think they had to plant four mitigation trees.

I shouldn't guess. 57. It says 57. But they, yeah, that just doesn't, I know that they planted four trees off site. 57 seems a little bit high to me. So, but anyway, they did do a great job at preserving trees on their site. They got rid of the trees that were hazardous or dead. And with our current code, there was no reduction worked in to eliminate that mitigation responsibility.

Right. So like even if you have a commercial property and you're trying to do the right thing You still have to mitigate the tree loss even if those trees are overgrown or shouldn't be there or property was neglected so I just you know, I think listening to Council members talk tonight. It just seems really difficult and I applaud you for I mean It's like trying to thread this needle of not raising costs but protecting because what what else I found interesting is not Not only housing costs and affordability was in the community survey, but availability of jobs and ability to open a business in Fort Collins. And so not only the impact that Julia brought up on housing, but then also just increasing the cost of commercial development as well. And I know we're trying to balance this. Trees are a very important part of Fort Collins and also keeping costs low and affordable. So I don't envy your position. I don't know what the right answer is. I think some things aren't quite ready for me. It's like number five I'm not sure if we're there yet of How we're going to move this forward. I will say that clarifying the street trees from what I saw in the comments super helpful to do and It may be my just misunderstanding of hearing different answers But with the permit process can the city say you can't cut down the tree after coming to look at it

Can you repeat that?

So if you're going through the permit process and you say, okay, I'd get a permit and the city comes out and looks at the tree, can the city say you can't cut down the tree?

Are you talking about the proposed commercial tree permit? That is what we are saying, but it would be more of a conversation on what the best path forward is for, of course, the business or the property owner to really understand what their goals are. And then we'd have the conversation around, okay, well, if this tree does need to come down, then this is how we need to replace it. And with what to keep that approved landscape plan in compliance.

So the city can say no.

That's what we're proposing. That's what you're proposing.

And if they say they did cut it down currently, they don't have to replace it in any way. And under your proposal, they would need to replace it in some way.

Currently, if they do remove the tree, they have to replace it. but we're so reactive in that effort right now um that it's we're just not there yeah this is a

tricky one i only think of like how we're going to administer this mainly because isn't it until like a year ago you actually had to have a permit to replace your toilet until we clean that up in the code like the like these things that we're just cleaning i mean i just like in theory yes but in reality I'm not sure how I would just I guess if this comes forward I'd want more information about how we're actually going to implement this and the cost and how like I mean so I think that there are some things we're just not ready to move forward I think the cleanup is great and some of these clarifications but these bigger policy ones I mean it just seems like Actually, both sides were happy, so I'm sorry. Too far, not far enough. But I think the cleanup, the clarification, as we are moving to trying to clarify in our code and make it more readable and easy and user-friendly, yes, I would support those updates.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's a very interesting conversation. I would echo that I don't envy you.

You know, I circled what number that I've lost.

I think that four seems like a really reasonable idea.

Three, I probably don't know enough, but it seems reasonable to me.

I'm supportive of anything that gives you guys more flexibility.

Because you said you only develop one thing once. Well, I mean, occasionally again, right? But I can imagine who was using it and said, once you've done one, you've done one, whatever that saying is, right? Everything's different. I mean, I'm familiar with stodges, right?

But anybody who looked at that would say, clean that out, right? Absolutely. There's probably tons of suckers. I'm like, you remember where it was? It was that old friendly fire building, right? What they've done is beautify it and clean it out. So I'm sure even though that there was that mitigation that they had to do, you were probably like, you know, you got to pay X amount to mitigate this.

We kind of feel bad because we understand what you're doing is actually exactly the right thing. I would like to give you guys more flexibility to use your common sense and your judgment to make the calls because every property is going to be different, right? You don't want the massive oak tree coming down and you have a point that it could be near its age. So it just doesn't feel like one size fits all.

That would be a very hard policy for you to bring to us, and I appreciate that. But I would be in favor of that. I don't know. They're the forestry department. I don't know. They're not the mentalist.

Because I think anything, I think what people are pointing out or picking up from different viewpoints,

is there's just a lot to pick on because there's just so much variability in it, right? So that's the hard spot that the written policies are in, right? So you say 11 inches huge. 11 inches of victory, 15 inches, you know, so, and you say, where do you get that? Well, I don't know. You just start using some sort of a standard or whatever, but it, you know, you can't really bring us a policy that says, you know, it's sort of a big tree when we say it is

right. That's, that's probably not very satisfying, but I would be for anything, um, that, you know,

I think four is extremely reasonable. I would stick with that if I were you, um,

I would go with five.

I mean, I trust you. I would just probably say that you struck a balance

and you reached out to people, right?

And then anything you can put in there that, you know, would also give you additional professional judgment based on the condition of the tree and the age and the size and scope of the property

because you're foresters. Yes. Yes. And you have a full commitment to adding more trees.

Remember the first budget offer they came with? We were like, no, that's enormous. Clearly, they are very tree-oriented people. Go ahead.

I always said this was a smart council because they're forcing me into the corner

that I'm going to have to vote yes for this if this comes to a vote. I was looking forward to voting no because I think it's a weakening and not going far enough. But my vote may be necessary, so I may have to vote yes. I want to go back to number one.

I don't think that's, and it's not council's fault, I don't think, nor your fault, nor anybody's fault. I don't think it's completely understood.

What things were approved on, what happened is one of two things happened there. A limb came down, and then all of a sudden either panic set in or they realized there's an opportunity to get rid of the tree to open up some more land. that tree was made to stay there as part of their development review process.

That matters to me, whether it was 30 years ago or five years ago or 50 years ago.

They don't just get to decide because a limb came down.

That's all this does is allow, the way I understand it, a consultation to say the tree's healthy. And if, by the way, it's not, I believe then they can take it down.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

If you guys go, wow, real danger, or take those seven limbs, or take the whole tree, boom, it's down.

This just means we don't invalidate what used to be a very involved process, yes, but a good process in the product that they can't just take it down as an excuse or willy-nilly.

That's why number one is important.

And you may rule that it can, and it's for 15 inches or greater, that's a pretty big tree.

That's why I'm lobbying for number one if this comes forward, if I understand that.

And the other thing, and there may be enough support for this already, but I'm just saying that I understand attainable and affordable housing are important.

It's not the only issue. And I'm not sure if you put it to a vote and said, let's tear down the healthy 100-year cottonwoods in town so we can cram in 50 more people in town.

I'm pretty confident where that vote would actually go, and it'd be on the side of the tree. So I think we've got to balance these things. I think it's a really good balance from a lot of people's perspective, not as far as I'd like it to go.

I think you did well with what you were presented and the environment that it was presented in currently.

But I don't think we should stop doing all of the other quality things, reasonable things that Fort Collins does,

because the misunderstanding of that cost equals price, it doesn't. Things are going to be charged what the market will bear.

and sometimes those costs are absorbed like the tariffs right now that are being absorbed at about 50 percent. It's not always all passed on dollar for dollar. It's what the market will bear. And I'm just I'm going to get bumper stickers printed up. Cost does not equal price what things sell for. Some things will be absorbed. Some will not. So we'll see where this goes from here.

Yeah. I do have a question to Kendra, because this was so valuable at the end. We didn't go through them here, but all the different examples. But that very last slide, I mean, half of them saw an increase, half saw a decrease. Like, what do you conclude from this data? Because that's, I think, where I'm going to, is it seems like we're just shifting it to a different place that seems more complex than actually solving any problems.

Let me try it quick, Kendra, and I will let Kendra answer to you. But I think this is where we're saying, since every site is different, this is a very difficult analysis, but essentially trying to make a cost-neutral policy that achieves better outcomes. So in retrospective, the foresters are able to look at sites and say, here's a place where they worked really hard to save these big trees. under the proposed policy, they would have lower costs. Here's a developer that just paid the fee, didn't work to do those. They're going to have a harder time doing that going forward. Now, all those sites will never be replicated going forward, so it's difficult to do. But that's the conclusion is that as we played with the policy and you could run these pro formas, it was like how are we achieving something that is not raising costs across the board and achieves better outcomes for very large trees. I'll use that term if it's more simple.

Well, it appears like that the reductions are way higher percentages than any of the increases. Can you explain why that turned out that way?

So it's a little bit tricky when you're comparing apples to apples in terms of the mitigation. So that's why you see a substantial decrease.

I don't know how best to explain it any more than that.

i mean i guess it could just be that every single one of these sites is so different

right exactly yeah yep exactly and um it kind of the same thing goes for um the increases if that project would have saved you know one more tree or two more trees um then they probably would have seen an additional reduction in their mitigation responsibility with the proposed the codes that

proposing this evening okay thank you melanie okay so i'm just going to put this in my own words because i think dina said it several times but i'm hearing that the purpose of this process is maybe to have people think more critically about the the trees on their property with the additional motivator of potentially saving some money because i i don't know it just looks like maybe like come and go they might have been like oh whoa maybe we should save three more trees and it'll bring down our development costs which ones make the most sense is that an accurate encapsulation of we're wanting more critical thought before they take trees down and maybe adjusting their develop redevelopment plans to preserve more trees and also save money Okay. Thank you. Anybody else? Trish.

Yeah, thank you for the really great work. Can you help me with number one, like with the process, what this would look like? Because I just kind of struggle right now with, you know, I think about enforcement. And we don't have enough enforcement, code enforcement officials right now. and we're looking at budget cuts. So I'm kind of trying to see how this would play out and it wouldn't slow down process or they would end up waiting forever for someone to come out and evaluate that. So could you talk about that a little?

Yeah, absolutely. So again, just a reminder, this is commercial properties that are outside of the development review process. These are existing commercial properties. and how we would kind of um you know start that conversation is really with our licensed arborists so we have you know close to 60 licensed arborists or licensed tree care companies um that we um that that we like or that we issue licenses for to do work here in fort collins every year we have an annual meeting with those arborists it's mandatory for them to renew their license. So even just the last couple years, we have been, you know, one, providing CEUs for them to continue their education and get, you know, credits towards their certifications, but two, doing additional education around how they are actually advocates in the community. Of course, they're doing ethical work in the community, but when they're pruning or removing trees on commercial properties especially removing that they need to be sharing that those those properties are part of an approved landscape plan and they are required to replace those trees when they come down so that is really the avenue is currently through our licensed tree care companies and then of course we have staff and our forestry zoning inspector that can also support this effort which is why we believe that there will be no cost or resources or staffing needed to support this program.

Okay, that helps. For instance, I'm thinking along Harmony. I think it's where that dialysis place is kind of by McMurray and that old cemetery there. I've noticed this cottonwood there that's hollowed out and looks like a hazard. So I would imagine if they wanted to cut that down and they had to get this permit, you could take that down. it's such an old site I think that I'm curious like would they then have to mitigate that or

they could just take that down um it depends on exactly where the tree is I don't know if you're talking about in the cemetery or if you're talking about the cottonwood that's a long harmony that recently had a big limb failure in it so that tree is actually on um private commercial property and they are in the process of removing or getting that tree removed because of that hazard.

Okay, and will they have to then mitigate?

And then they will plant one new tree. Okay.

And we'll wait 100 years.

And Kendra, can you remind how much it costs to take down a tree that big?

Yeah, so it really depends on the equipment and the staff that's there to remove a tree like that. For something like that and along the Harmony Corridor with lots of traffic control, they'll probably use a crane to remove that tree. So it's probably upwards to $5,000 or $6,000, maybe more, to remove that tree.

I would say more. We had to take down a 75-foot cotton tree that was dead and put a crane into the backyard. and this was in 2015 and they way underbid it at $7,500. So it will be substantial.

I think I can support number one. Number two, talking about that King Soopers, the new King Soopers, I noticed yesterday there's the dead tree there.

So what's it? Yeah, over by the gas station. well the existing gas station on the corner so could you describe the process there and can we turn a fan back on Tyler has a specific job every every meeting thank you Tyler so they're required to protect them what does that look like if they don't protect them so it's just really an education piece

there yeah so every again a part of the development review process every tree

that's with the current code every tree that's on site receives a mitigation

value. If that tree dies, then they are responsible for replacing that mitigation value if it dies

from construction. And Kendra, I would say on this one, one way to think about this policy is maybe implementing best practices around tree protection. So I think this is a simplification, but right now on a plan, a developer will say we'll protect this tree, and there are some standards around that, But this is saying, no, no, these standards are more specific. The fence has to go here. It has to be double-fenced. So it's the same requirement, the same commitment from a developer, but it's saying there's something a little more tangible to enforce and inspect and require. So I would just classify those as more best management practices around a requirement that's already in place if that helps understand how we would think about it.

So we don't see an added expense for the city or for the developer with number two?

I might say that maybe developers are skirting their responsibilities some there. So, you know, it probably is, it's just hard to say it could be more expensive to protect it than to not protect it, but then they would avoid the cost of having it die and have to mitigate it. So, obviously, the outcome of a little more money to protect it and not have to mitigate it is better for a developer, but it could go either way. As well as the cost for removal. Right. Yep. Okay.

I think I could be okay with that one. Number three, I kind of have questions there on what does that look like practically? So we have a developer come in, they develop a site, they're gone in a year and a half, they're, say, not local. How are we holding them to this? And what does that process look like?

yeah so um i would say that you know we've been kind of so there are other policies that we've put in place that have really set this one up for success um and with um you know the addition of the

zoning the forestry zoning inspector um there's regular conversations around that um we do understand that there are developments that finish you know in less than a year um but they

do have to have all of their approved landscape plan in compliance before they move on. Otherwise, the city will hold a bond or, you know, for the warranty of that, of those, of those plants or

those trees. And so I would say it's already a pretty well vetted process. But this one really pertains, I think, more towards those larger neighborhood developments where they're there for five plus years. And again, still just trying to make it a little bit more predictable of when

they can move on. So does that now mean a higher bond level or what does this practically mean?

I don't know. I don't think so. I don't think so. I think what Kendra was saying before is that we have improved the requirements around planting these trees, and we're more confident that at three years, we're accepting, for the most part, established trees, rather than just sort of like replacing a tree and waiting for that one for two years, replacing it again and waiting again. So I think in general, we would still have a similar bond or escrow held if a developer would actually like leave or abandon the project but um but overall i think we're just feeling confident that this is a reasonable time to establish a tree and that we would be mostly accepting established trees with this policy

okay i'm unsure i mean this whole it is a tough balance between how do we move forward with our communities real priority of affordable housing that's number one environment is in the top three but I'm concerned about how this might impact affordable housing so kind of up in the air on this one I'm fine with number four and number five like looking at that chart it does the numbers feel all over the place and i know that as you said it's based on each lot is different and each development is different but i'm i'm still sorting through that one so i don't really have an answer for you because i'm just really concerned again the affordable housing impact but i can support these other ones that i mentioned so thank you again for all the incredible work here

anybody else

i i hesitate to ask if you have enough

i don't really know i'm looking at kelly here too but i do feel like maybe it may be good to clarify next step because um i was just going to say i like i really do appreciate a lot of good dialogue here and we heard council members all over the map on all five policies which is fair and so i am just struggling a little on a next step we could bring them forward individually for a vote uh we could try i'm actually asking this question of like did we hear enough sort of like feedback on some of the policies for us to change them a little bit but i'm not sure we did around this. I'm kind of punting Kelly. What do you think? Or Mayor? What would be a good next step? Yeah, I appreciate that, Dean. I was sitting

here thinking as well, this is one where I want to test clarity of is the next step to bring all five forward and then sort of sort out at a regular meeting which ones you want to move forward or are there is there any further guidance here in terms of what we would actually bring forward.

I mean, I'd be happy, personally, not speaking for the council, I'd be happy to have them come to council and we go through the five and maybe with, you know, the final chart, maybe just some more clarity around that final chart because you see 138% mitigate. You know, those numbers are just, I know what you're trying to get at. Like just take Stodges, for instance, it went from whatever, then down with the new policy, it would have been zero, zero, because they were doing the work and making it clean and doing all this stuff. And then you see 138% reduction, whatever it was. And it just feels like a funny number to go along with that concept, although I know what you're trying to communicate. So maybe just a little more refinement in some of the explanations of each policy based on some of the good questions each individual member had. I don't know. I don't want you to go back and do a whole bunch more work.

Yeah, I mean, I think there's a little bit more maybe vetting and clarification that we can do based on some of the feedback that we heard. I'm not sensing that at this point there's enough specific around that work that coming back for another work session would necessarily be helpful versus maybe again coming forward and having more opportunity at a regular council meeting to prioritize in that way

you know what was super super helpful with the TOD was when two counselors met with the team in a relaxed atmosphere just to really go over some early questions and maybe for the counselors who have a lot more additional questions and that might me myself as well to just have a chance to sit if that's not too staff intensive i mean that that's a really good way to get some some informal questions and discussions i don't know but melanie did you have

an idea yeah well i'm going back to that last chart and i guess i need clarification and the the two person meetings might be good, but the chart that you had is showing the decisions the developer made, how much it would have cost with the old system and the new system. And I guess what would be helpful to me would have been, had they, like an example with come and go, had they kept these two trees, it would have ended up this way. Because I think that's what you're getting at. Right now we're just looking, like they didn't have the opportunity to make any choices. They did what they did and were just looking at the cost. But they probably would have developed differently. So I guess for me that had we gone out and consulted, we probably would have recommended they keep this tree and this tree, and then their costs would have gone down significantly. Not for every example on there,

but maybe just a couple of illustrations of with our new process and that new consultation, and this may be the outcome. That would be helpful to me. Does that make sense?

Yeah, just a quick response there, because I actually think we have been all wanting that exactly, and that is a really difficult analysis to do, because we don't know what that changes on the developer side. So, if saving these two trees, we can do that math, but we can't say they just lost a bay of a gas station or three housing units or something else. So, that's, you know, again, we just don't, we've got partners in this project that can help us guess at some of that but that's a really uh we just get really speculative on no that makes

sense i guess i will just in my head but see i think that's a good example of a question if we had um a conversation a little bit that could be cleared up by just that that's what i'm guessing yeah and then i think the five policies could come to council just a little more discussion and then we can hash out. Go ahead, Kelly.

I agree, Mayor, that other groups, the staff that come before us make their case. I'm not saying this is good work, but I think now we're asking for you to make your case somewhat. And name drop alert. I was good friends. Most of them are no longer with us now, but with developers in town, David Neen and Gene Mitchell, Bill Neal, all this, They said, Kelly, just give us predictability. This gives more predictability than we had before. The forester would go out and say, I think that, and by the way, I'm not diminishing this. Foresters would go out and say, this needs this much, and correct me if I'm wrong, this much mitigation, which I kind of preferred to the size of the trees is how many, that's a little engineering for me versus value added from the quality of the tree. It's just based on size, but that's predictability. The three years is predictability. It's like the difference that they would save by having to be responsible for three years and not knowing if it's five or seven, it's huge. Three years is nothing in development terms. To me, it's all about predictability because these cost differences aren't, once again, the trees they replace are like that big. But the changes we made, the good ones, they're not going to die as soon. I think the wider, that was one of them, the irrigation, correct me when I'm wrong, and maybe some others. But I think you should just make your case now. We've discussed it. We've had our questions. You've taken whatever lumps were to be given and now make your case, and we can say yay or nay for one through five. I think that's what we need to do, but it's far more predictable. I'm not exactly a proponent of what's before us, but the other thing I just want to make is otherwise we revert to what's there. We don't revert. We revert to no policies. We revert to the current tree systems.

Correct. That's right.

That's the other thing. We don't go to no. We don't go to the no alternative. We go back to the existing tree policies that probably need some process improvements and predictability. The other thing I just want to touch on on the thing when we lost the trees at the Lincoln Center because the person slammed into them with the heavy equipment and the padding around it didn't work, that's why we're adding a little chain link fence as a as so that the construction people when they aren't thinking clearly and back up to go I just touched the fence which is two feet from there three feet from the tree and the added cost of that little fence being there that they'll use time and time again is much greatly offset it by if they knock out a big legacy tree it's going to cost them compared to that a fortune not a fortune but a lot more money but those are the things you should put in maybe that's appropriate

for the council presentation but in the meantime if councils have council members have time and interest to sit down with maybe one of the three of you I don't know who with specific questions or more clarification that might help before we get to council would that be okay and we're happy to do that thank Okay, does that seem reasonable to council? Okay, great anything else any other counselors like to say anything? Oh, it's time for announcements. I Love that part. I Don't have any announcements. Yeah. Oh, yeah next Monday's holiday

enjoy and

And last next Tuesday is Mr. Calhoun's last day

Wednesday. Okay, I've got bad information.

That's okay. Well, we're going to miss you.

We'll see you next Tuesday at council.

Oh, come on. Probably not. This is it? This is it?

Well, would you like to stand up and we can give you a little bit of appreciation?

Yay.

Okay.

Great, that's it. Goodnight, Fort Collins.