City Council Work Session — September 23, 2025

Good evening Fort Collins. The time is now 6 p.m. and I call the work session to order. Tonight we have Spanish interpretation available online. I'm going to turn it over to our interpreters, Lydia and Irene, on Zoom to explain how to listen online.

Good evening. The following instructions are given for those who will be needing interpretation into Spanish. Muy buenas noches, les saludan sus intérpretes Lidia e Irene. Esta noche, aquellos de ustedes que requieran interpretación al español, les daremos unas instrucciones. En breve aparecerá y se activará la función para interpretación al español. Ustedes verán un globo terráqueo, ya sea en la esquina superior derecha o en la esquina inferior derecha. press that blue light and then choose the language you want to hear, which is Spanish. And with that, we will be ready. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Irene. And before I turn over to the city manager, I'll just note that we have the mayor joining us remotely. All right. Will the city manager please provide a review of tonight's work session agenda?

Yes. Thank you, Mayor Pro Tem. Good evening, everyone. We have three items on tonight's agenda as was originally published. The first is a look at our 2026 budget revisions and recommendations there. Next will be a discussion on mobile home park enforcement.

And then our final item of the evening is the which wheels go where project update.

So Mayor Pro Tem, if you're ready, we'll go ahead and get started. I'm going to introduce Caleb Weitz, who's our chief financial officer. He's joined by our budget director, Lawrence Pollack, and Jen Posnanovic, our sales and use tax director. I'll just note that this is an item that all of council at some level has had some discussion up to this point, particularly those of you who are in the council finance committee have heard some of this information

and will offer a note of gratitude for helping provide input and shaping what we want to bring to you tonight.

I'll just also set the stage by saying this is very unusual as we're doing our budget revision process

That we're looking at a slate of reductions Typically revisions are slight ads that we want to make during the process and so Again acknowledge this is a much harder conversation than we typically have during budget revisions With that I will turn it over to the team to walk us through where we are and what recommended decisions we have in front of you

Good evening, Mayor, Pro Tem, Council. It's a pleasure to be here tonight. I'll jump right into the presentation, maybe.

So this is our agenda for this evening's work on the budget revisions. We'll start with an overview of some of the large budgetary pressures that we're currently facing.

We'll get into some detail about revenue and expense trends, have a quick discussion about actions that have taken place in this current fiscal year, 2025, and what additional things we're monitoring to close out this fiscal year.

And then finally, get into the meat of what are the city manager's recommended actions for the 2026 budget revision.

So on this slide here, you can see some of our most significant budgetary challenges. And I will get into some of these in a little more detail as we go through the presentation. But just starting from the top, we historically have been very reliant on general fund reserves

being generated through underspending or revenue overcollection. At the end of 2024,

There were no general fund reserves that are available for nearly any purpose that were generated. So that is a significant pressure that we don't have that one-time revenue source available to us going into 2026. Inflation continues to be an issue. While inflation rate increases have slowed over the past year, the increased costs that we have seen really since COVID have not subsided. And one of the ways to think about that is with inflation, there are some things that we immediately saw. So the city immediately saw the benefit of inflation through sales and use tax. Our largest tax revenue source, as the cost of goods went up, we were collecting proportionally more revenue. Some of our costs went up fairly quickly on the expenditure side, such as compensation, as we had to keep pace with our competitive market so that we could retain good employees. But then some of our other costs have taken years to catch up, whether that's as we go to renew contracts, as we see higher costs for equipment we purchase, vehicles and things like that. So those inflationary pressures, especially in our supplies and services portion of the budget, are very significant cost pressure right now. In terms of personnel costs or talent costs, we are, once again, and this is a good problem to have, but we are seeing higher levels of employee retention than we had planned for in the budget. So that is causing significant pressure on our personnel budget and requiring us to address that expenditure level in the 2026 recommendations. We're seeing higher program costs. An example of that, which I'll discuss a little bit in this presentation, is the grocery tax rebate program, which is on track to be almost double what was budgeted in this current year. Then finally, this is all happening in the backdrop of continued economic uncertainty. There's a lot of mixed signals in the economy right now. we're seeing a lot of cities up and down the front range having significant budgetary challenges particularly on the revenue side and Jen's going to talk about that in some of her slides one thing I'll note is that the state released its quarterly economic forecast yesterday and while there are some underlying signs of resilience that we're seeing in Colorado's economy such as the Colorado unemployment rate has now slipped below the national unemployment rate. The state is forecasting significantly less revenue growth in the next year than historical averages. And based on that latest information, we think that continues to underscore the approach that we're taking in the budget revisions here.

So just to get in a little more detail on general fund reserves by year, I'll draw your attention on this chart to the blue bar at the top. That is the unassigned portion of our general fund

reserves that we have historically generated each year. On the right-hand side of this slide, you can see examples of how those general fund reserves have been invested in the last two budget cycles these general fund reserves have been an important source for asset management for advancing council priorities and for other priorities of the city and as i mentioned on the previous slide and you can see in the 2024 bar this was the first time in certainly recent history we did not produce any unassigned fund balance at the end of the year. On one hand, the city remains in solid financial shape. All of the city's reserves are fully funded at their policy level. But on the other hand, it significantly reduces our flexibility as we're going into a time of continued economic uncertainty.

This chart here, which I showed the council a similar version of earlier

this summer. This is showing our turnover rates. The first three sets of bars are the past three

full years. The bars for 2025 represent six months of data, but as you can see, even if you extrapolate

out the 2025 data through the entire year, we are on track to have significantly less turnover this

year than we've seen in previous years. And once again, that's putting pressure on our personnel

budgets. Now I'm going to turn it over to Jen who's going to walk through the most up-to-date information on sales and use tax which is our largest tax revenue source. Thank you Caleb and

good evening counsel. As Caleb mentioned we're going to talk about sales and use tax as it is the largest governmental revenue source for the city of Fort Collins roughly 50 percent of the city's governmental revenue. So year to date, we have results through August. For sales tax compared to budget, we are $1.7 million under budget. That would be about $3.2 million under budget without one-time revenue. It's been a strong year for audits and voluntary disclosure agreements. For use tax, $4.3 million over budget through August. That would be about $1.3 million dollars over budget without some strong one-time revenue for audits and also seeing some strong building permit use tax so far this year. Combined, $2.6 million over budget, or that would be $1.9 million under budget without that strong one-time revenue. Taxable sales are up 1.2% through August. Looking at taxable sales instead of tax Collections due to the timing of the 2050 tax that tax was effective in January of 2024 But collections didn't start until February of 2024 Growth of 4.2 percent is needed to hit the sales tax budget for 2025 That's due to coming in under budget in 2024 for sales tax We're also seeing some softening to grab across the majority of our sales tax categories except for those that are majority online sales and this slide is that same information but showed graphically so on the left hand side we have the sales and use tax budget through August the gray is sales tax the light blue is use tax and in the middle column there that is actual collections through August 1% under budget for sales tax 26% over budget for use tax or combined 2% Over budget that's that two point six million dollar number from the previous slide if we take out some of that one-time Revenue that third column there is our actuals without one-time revenue We would be three percent under budget for sales tax eight percent over budget for use tax or combined under budget by one percent Or about one point nine million dollars

We wanted to show some trends and projections across the front range So the middle column there are the budgets for those cities for 2025 the far right column is the 2025 year-to-date growth It's July or the most recent data available

What's important to note here is that most cities are realizing budget shortfalls some cities like Windsor Westminster Manchester, Aurora, Commerce City are seeing growth.

However, some cities are seeing some one-time revenue that's really impacting growth. So in conversations with Aurora, without some really strong one-time revenue, they would

be closer to 2.3% growth, not that 4.9% figure that you see on there.

And then Denver has revised their forecast for 2025, anticipating 0.3% growth, and then flat growth in 2026.

And Caleb did note today that the state has just published their new revenue forecast for next year. Although he mentioned some other figures for sales and use tax, they are actually revising their figures up slightly to be closer to historical averages by 26 and 27.

This slide here shows 2025 and 2026 forecasts for sales and use tax.

That first chart there shows our 2025 budget, and then the second column is the 2025 forecast.

For the 2025 forecast, staff is anticipating flat growth between sales and use tax.

And then the bottom chart there, that's showing our 2026 budget in the first column, 2026 revision in the second column.

For sales tax, for the revision, anticipating combined, or for sales tax, we're anticipating 2% growth off of an adjusted forecast from 2025.

So that would be taking out some of that strong one-time revenue and then anticipating 2% growth on top of that. And then keeping use tax flat from the current 2026 budget. So combined, that's a 3% shortfall or $7.1 million.

This slide here shows that same information but graphically again so the left hand side is the 2025 budget sales taxes in gray use taxes that light blue

Anticipating flat growth in 2025 for 2026 the third column there That's 3% growth off of the 2025 budget and then then on the far right

You'll see the 2026 revision which is 2% growth on the 2025

Forecast but adjusted out for some of that strong one-time revenue and that growth into the staffs anticipating is 2% growth so combined a 3% shortfall or 7.1 million dollars And I'll pass it back over to Caleb

Thank You Jen Unfortunately, sales and use tax is not the only area where we are seeing signs of concern with revenue.

A few other notable areas, photo traffic enforcement. We are currently estimating a $1.5 million revenue shortfall in the current year, 2025.

Very unsure of how trends will evolve with that into 2026. So we are forecasting that revenue conservatively, estimating up to another $1.5 million shortfall again in 2026. There are not at this point significant offsetting expenditure savings as most of the expenditures associated with that new revenue have been programmed.

Some other areas where we're seeing revenue concerns, interest on investments is lower in the general fund due to the lower general fund balance that we are currently holding.

And next year we are seeing a significant reduction in the state's marijuana tax shareback.

I'll now pivot to the current year budget, 2025.

So this slide here is just some highlights of what actions have been implemented to date and what staff is doing to continue to monitor the current fiscal year. So we identified earlier this year that there would be a projected general fund deficit if corrective action was not taken. So staff did react quickly to economic conditions that were evolving. We implemented a number of one-time expenditure reductions earlier this year. Hiring pause was put in place earlier this spring, which shifted to a hiring freeze in early August to address the overages that we're seeing in our personnel costs. And then we are generally having tighter management of expenditures.

As we discussed with Council Finance earlier this month, there are two known additional needs that need to be addressed in 2025.

Transport is significantly over budget due to really historic cost pressures that the transit industry is seeing. And the grocery tax rebate, which I mentioned earlier. Once again, this is a good news item. We're seeing a large uptick in usage for that program as our outreach efforts have really worked well. But we are significantly over budget in that program.

Throughout the remainder of this year, staff will continue to monitor the budget. We are just this week in a series of forecast meetings to forecast our year-end position.

and staff will take any additional actions that are necessary to ensure that the general fund ends the year in a positive position.

So now moving to the city manager's 2026 budget revision recommendations. So just to ground us with what we're doing tonight, as Kelly mentioned, typically revision and processes are some small additional adds to the budget. This year, what is being recommended

is a reduction of expenditures, specifically in the general fund, to match our current revenue forecast. There are other actions being recommended to ensure that fund balances remain positive. And then there are a few non-general fund high-priority projects and needs that were not KNOWN IN THE LAST BUDGET CYCLE THAT ARE ALSO INCLUDED. SO THIS SLIDE HERE IS JUST AN OVERVIEW OF WHAT WE ARE CURRENTLY FORECASTING FOR THE GENERAL FUND. AND ONCE AGAIN, THE GENERAL FUND IS THE CITY'S MAIN OPERATING BUDGET ON THE GOVERNMENTAL SIDE. WE ARE FORECASTING $8.7 MILLION IN LOWER REVENUES.

The bulk of this is from sales and use tax, but I also mentioned some of the other areas of revenue uncertainty that we have heading into next year. And then we have $6.7 million in higher expense projections. Most of this is personnel budgets. As I mentioned, we are experiencing high levels of retention, which is great.

but that causes us to need to increase our personnel expenditure budget to be able to pay for all those employees that we have.

And then finally, due to the lack of available reserves, we have built some additional contingencies in the budget

so we are able to address regularly occurring items that we have typically gone to general fund reserves for, such as our snow a portion of our snow budget this budget picture does not

include two other adjustments the grocery tax rebate program which I'll

discuss a little bit more on the next slide and then there's an additional funding need for transport that we are recommended and a appropriation from the

2050 transit tax on grocery tax rebate what the main thing I'll note here is that in your council packet on Thursday there was a follow-up memo from the council Finance Committee we are anticipating that there will be a need

for an additional four hundred and fifteen thousand dollars for the grocery tax rebate program next year following council finance the team and I

went back and took a look at the digital inclusion program and we are

projecting that in the current year 2025 and 2026 there will be a significant

amount of underspend so we believe that that four hundred fifteen thousand dollars is a bit is available in the digital inclusion funds as a one-time solution for 2026 without significantly impacting the financial position of connection that we discussed at Council Finance

So just to talk at a high level about the city manager's budget revision recommendations, the main headlines here are that our recommendations for closing that $15.4 million general fund gap do avoid any involuntary separations for classified and unclassified classified positions and unclassified management positions and we are able to preserve a 2% pay increase you can see here some of the key strategies that we use to address the budget gap this recommendation is a broad-based recommendation and the results of many hours of staff work this summer to really evaluate every option that was available to us to ensure that we were bringing forward the most responsible package. So this slide here is a look at the reductions by category and these are four categories that we have just put together in terms of broad thematic categories to help you as a council and the public to understand where those reductions are coming from. The largest portion is in personnel savings, and these are mainly citywide actions. We are looking at a phased release of the hiring freeze next year, the reduction to the pay increase, some opportunities from savings from overperformance that we're currently seeing in the benefits fund. The next categorization is vacant position elimination. And I apologize for the typo on this slide. It is 27 vacant positions that are being recommended for reduction. And I do want to note with those positions that we recognize that some of those might not be the most strategic positions to reduce.

And we expect as we go into next year, there will be some opportunity to reassess eliminated positions as other vacancies occur, which generate similar budgetary savings.

There are program and service reductions and then also funding shifts and revenue enhancements. And this is probably a good place to note that in the agenda packet for tonight, we prepared a detailed document which outlines the impacts of each of the reduction actions by both categorization at the citywide level and then the service area level. this next slide is and just to be clear between the last slide and this slide this is just a

different way to look at that same 15.4 million dollars so what what we have here is there are

10.4 million dollars worth of reductions that were service area generated reduction proposals

The remaining actions are citywide actions, mainly in personnel, that are being taken to reach that $15.4 million number.

And I'll note that about 70% of the reductions are ongoing reductions, and about 30% are one-time savings.

So of the $10.4 million that originated from service area reductions, you can see on this chart here where those are coming from, specifically by a service area view. The largest dollar amount is PDT which also is the largest governmental fund department I'll also note that there are significant reductions being made in information and employee services IES where that equates to about 10% of their

governmental fund unrestricted budget finally I'll note that while police is taking a significant reduction at 1.1 million dollars on a percentage basis

this is smaller than most other service areas notably their police is about 80 percent personnel in their budget so as we put together a recommendation that prioritized not doing involuntary separations that was a significant

consideration. This slide and the next one are simply a listing of the vacant positions that are being eliminated. And once again, I'll note that we recognize that some of these are not potentially the most strategic positions to eliminate, and we expect additional evaluation

of these positions as other vacancies occur next year and certainly as we head into the

next two-year budget cycle. Finally, as I mentioned, there are some non-general fund enhancements that are included in the revision package. This includes the voter-approved renewal

of the street maintenance program beginning in 2026 to put additional funds into the transportation fund or this appropriation action will put those funds into the transportation fund utility customer information system some additional operational costs there one of the actions that is recommended is actually a general fund addition which is a new sales tax auditor we believe conservatively that position will generate at least $200,000 a year in revenue. In looking at some of our comparable cities along the Front Range, we think there is additional opportunity to ensure that we are collecting all the sales tax that is legally owed to the city. And then finally, there is the transport

THE TRANSFORT APPROPRIATION THAT IS NEEDED FOR THEIR OPERATIONS AND

SOME ADDITIONAL GRANTS TO BE APPROPRIATED IN THE TRANSIT FUND.

IN TERMS OF THE CALENDAR, SO WE HAD COUNCIL FINANCE ON SEPTEMBER 4TH.

AND I'LL ECHO KELLY, I DO WANT TO THANK THE COUNCIL FINANCE COMMITTEE FOR THEIR EXTREMELY HELPFUL FEEDBACK AS WE PREPARED FOR THIS SESSION.

SO WE ARE TONIGHT AT THE COUNCIL'S FIRST WORK SESSION.

For October 14th, we are planning on using that time primarily to focus on some utility fund issues, both in terms of reconfirming the utility rates that are currently planned in the 2026 budget, as well as some potential project appropriation actions.

Additionally, for October 14th, we will bring any follow-up that is requested from this meeting, and then we'll plan to take the 2026 appropriation item to council in November.

And in terms of wrap-up, the purpose of tonight is to just understand what questions and feedback that you have on the city manager's recommended budget revisions. if there's any helpful items that we as staff can bring back on October 14th in terms of additional information once again I'll note in your packet the a the in addition to the AIS there is the listing of impacts of the budget a proposed budget reductions by service area so with that we will be happy to

answer any questions thank you well thank you is very informative and comprehensive so do council members have any questions or comments yeah Trisha

thanks thank you for the very thoughtful thorough and mindful way you went about this and really looking to preserve existing employment i think that's really important you know this is not fun i think for anybody sitting here or anyone impacted in the community but one area of concern has that we've heard a lot about today was concerning the eviction

and the Legal Defense Fund, and I wanted to hear some more thoughts on that, please.

Yeah, I'm happy to start with that. So, again, as we went through... Through the list of services, you saw the overall strategy that we took. One of the sources that we also looked at were what are the things that were currently being funded with those one-time general fund reserves. And so many of the things that were on that list, we have taken out entirely. Things like asphalt art have been removed. The Poudre flows, that was removed. this was something that was funded with those one-time reserves that we know is a very very impactful program and so looked at keeping as limited impact with doing only a five percent reduction there kind of in line with what we did in some of the other larger service service reductions yeah I'm curious if there is

a way that we could preserve that funding there um if there's anywhere else that we could adjust those are really important programs and i i think we're we're seeing the need in the community

for those thank you yeah julie yeah thank you um i want to echo trisha's statements i do appreciate the thoughtful work that went into this and um yeah for being on for six years is the first time we've had to do something like this. I mean, COVID was one part, but that was a little different.

I do have one question, and this is kind of also for, oh, sorry, also for the public, but, you know, you frequently hear the photo traffic enforcement, that's just for the city to make some money. Can you talk about where actually that money is directed to go and how

that lines up with the cuts that are proposed. Yeah, so the photo radar enforcement, it is not a way for the city to make money. Obviously, the goal of that program is traffic safety, which is a goal I know we all share. So what the revenue that was planned on from that program really goes back to both administer the traffic program and pay for additional expenses that support the council's Vision Zero goals and support other traffic enforcement efforts. So the challenge that we're currently having with that revenue is most of those expenditures are people, and most of those people are currently in place. So as hopefully we see that revenue source, I mean, on one hand, it's good for it not to meet expectations. If that's truly what pans out as we get into a stabilized year next year, hopefully as people slow down, that's something we'll continue to evaluate if we are at the correct service level to be able to administer that program. But as of now, we are in a position where we have basically hired most of the staff to be able to administer that program. And we are not seeing the levels of revenue come in that we

had planned on. Okay, thanks, Caleb. So hopefully that's helpful. And so I think if I remember from

discussions, and I'm sorry if you mentioned this, and I went off on my own in my brain for a minute,

A lot of those people, are they filling other jobs then if they're not as busy?

So not to get too in the weeds on that program, it's really difficult to know what a stabilized level of service looks like for that program right now, just like it's really difficult to know what stabilized revenue will look like after that program has been operational for a year. I don't know if I can speak to all the details of what those staff members are doing. I know that, you know, for example, the municipal courts right now is going through a significant technology system implementation that's causing some capacity and workload issues there as they work through that project. So as I mentioned, this is something that certainly we on a staff level will be evaluating, especially ahead of the next full budget process and keeping the council updated on.

Okay, thank you. Yeah, go ahead.

And I might also add that in the municipal court, there is actually a vacancy in one of those roles right now as well. So I do think, again, we're making some internal adjustment there to try and keep up with the existing workload.

Okay. Yeah, thank you. And I apologize. I didn't mean to say, like, what is this person doing every day? Like, not in that way at all. Just it's an interesting way that program has evolved. So thank you for that. I also want to echo the sentiments of the eviction fund and the legal defense fund. for several reasons, actually. One of those, and as it was mentioned in the AIS, there was an administrative error in our last budget,

and so they were already, I think it was $30,000 short. Is that correct?

Yeah, I'm happy to address that. So basically, when the program was started as a pilot, it was at $150,000 for 18 months. In the 23-24 budget, it was funded at $250,000 a year. When that offer went through the 25-26 budget, this is what you're referring, it was put in at $220,000 a year and went through the full approval process at that level. And then one of the other things I'll just add that was an unanticipated add to that program was we did receive a $100,000 grant from the Colorado Health Foundation. And so that was part of what covered that $30,000 gap for both what would have been last year and this year.

Okay. Thank you for that clarification. Well, other reasons is, you know, on this program we do get, there are reports posted of the impact.

And I feel like taking that away is actually just going to exacerbate the issue that we find in many of these areas with sales tax, et cetera. as well as I see this as from the programs that I've seen one of the most efficient it does so much with so little money I think I can't wait till our new budget process is in place and I hope it takes things into account like how outcomes how the outcomes are related to how much input is going in because I think that'll be so important so I would also encourage finding a way to not include those funds in these revisions. And I think that's all I had for questions

and comments. Thank you so much. Thank you. And I will note on the new budget process, we have heard the council loud and clear that you were very interested in outcome measures as we move forward into the next cycle. So we're looking forward to that as well.

Great. Anyone else? Kelly?

Thank you.

I'll echo what's been said. No secrets here. It's a lot of information. Very well done.

I have a couple concerns, but that's not with how you've done the job. Done it very well. Full disclosure. We'll even get more. So well done there. I won't echo the concerns I already mentioned, so I'll go to a different one, which is dealing with when you go to the chart that deals with sustainability services. And it's the second largest, I think. I'm struggling to find my notes here now on sustainability. It's at 6.8. Yeah, it's the second largest percentage cut. But what I have trouble with on this particular one is an area that the past Council strongly supported, environmental sustainability.

And I heard your comments about adjustments may be made next year. I'm more concerned about adjustments being made now when we vote.

And this Council has supported things. and we've also made it clear that some things, for a variety of reasons, have moved too slowly for us in that particular area. And the key chart, to me, is the good memo you put together dated September 18th, the follow-up to the, I think it was maybe the work session or maybe the finance committee. They all run together when you're on both. But it also mentions that we have currently the vacancies that are currently vacant and ministerively frozen. And it's not just the data analysis and environmental sustainability. It's just not the lead specialist in, wow, is that one? I think one of them is supposed to be economic.

Are all four of them open? Lead specialist, it says environmental sustainability, senior specialist, environmental sustainability, data analyst, environmental sustainability, director of environmental sustainability.

sustainability. That's in that memo, really. It's an area that's disappointed me as it is,

just speaking for myself, and the priorities that we place on some of those and the lack of action in some areas. So that's just very problematic to me that we have those four positions. They are under environmental services, I was correct. The Economic Health Office was up above that. So four positions frozen, and I believe two or three on the other charts, there's different documents at least eliminated for now. So take it away.

Yeah. Jacob Castillo, our Chief Sustainability Officer, can talk a little bit about certainly some of the impact, but also the strategy around that moving forward.

yeah so uh thank you for the question council member olson um i mean as you recognize well let me back up you know environmental services as a department has gone through a pretty significant metamorphosis over the past 12 to 24 months not only um a change in director two times over but we've done a reorganization of the of the staff moving away from kind of subject matter domains air quality waste reduction and recycling and climate to have a more cross-functional interdisciplinary team so there's just been significant evolution in how we how we do business and what it is that we focus on certainly you know focusing on the priorities of City Council in so just recognizing that transition different way of doing business what we currently have now is a vacancy at the director at the director level I'm really proud of the management team who stepped up with me to lead that lead that department and I imagine that I would my plan going forward is to leave that director level position vacant through the end of the year to until we can finish some structural changes that we're doing within the service area as as well as kind of recalibrate with the rest of the team. So that's why that position is left vacant. The other vacant positions are just a function of people moving on to other opportunities. I think the most significant area where we're going to see gaps is in the data collection and analysis. So losing that analyst position does detract from our ability to do some of that work. That said, I'm pleased to announce the person who is formally in that role is contracted to make sure we get our greenhouse gas inventory completed by the end of the year. And we've also migrated a position within the sustainability service area admin function over to environmental services. So we're trying to mitigate the impacts to the decreased capacity. I think we're going to be somewhat constrained for the next 12-ish months through 26, but some of the measures that we're taking, both structurally and the way we're organizing our work, which I believe will be more efficient, should get us back to kind of regular operating capacity near the end of 26.

Yeah, thanks for the answer. it's still not going to be enough to get me to yes when this comes before council unless I get

more information and some assurances because I also heard if they're a priority of councils when other positions go away that there might be a prioritization by the management team to fill

some of these gaps that are most important to council. Yeah and Councilmember Olson I think

it's really part of that conversation again is clarity on those results and we've heard some of that through work sessions already. And so again, our refocusing some of the existing resources we have, I think it's really important to note that it's not only a like per person translates into a direct result. Some of it's other ways of how we're going to accomplish that work. And I don't want to minimize the fact that certainly there is an impact to having this number of vacant positions. Yeah, I mean, it's a statement. I mean,

I mean, I've had my concerns the last four years and four months anyway about the emphasis or lack thereof on environmental issues.

And it's kind of a statement to have the director of environmental sustainability vacant for a year. It's just not acceptable to me, just as one council member. It just confirms my worst thoughts.

So any information that you can give us when the memo comes either before the second work session or at the second work session packet to flesh this out of timing. Because the other thing that some may not know in the room, that historically these positions, for ridiculous reasons, were hard fought to get the funding for these. They usually involve compromises. I'm not speaking recently with other council members to create these positions, and I don't like them going poof and going away under the guise of, well, we're really better organized now, so we really don't need them. They were council directives that were hard-fought and compromises and deals made openly of supporting other people's things so they support things, and these positions were hard-fought for. They didn't come from management recommendations generally. They were usually after the fact, actually, in the budget. So that's the history of a lot of the...

I'll move on now to the Council member Olson. Can I ask a question? I just I want to make sure as we respond in the follow-up memo that I'm answering your question or you know our team is answering your question. Would you like to know kind of organizational structure of environmental services and how we're utilizing existing capacity to meet the goals and objectives of the service the service area? because we are changing the way we do business. And I understand, you know, a lot of these positions were hard fought, but they were domain experts. They were created to do, you know, singular functions. And we're looking at a different way of doing business. So I want to make sure that we're giving you the information you need to be.

Well, then I want to know at the end of the day, is the overall budget being reduced and those any details that you can give us? Because I'm skeptical.

Yeah, anything you want.

Yeah, I think what would be helpful for me too is I guess if you could list what work exactly is not going to get done because these positions are gone, if any, because then that will help. Because I love hearing what you're saying, because I love efficiencies, if you're able to do the work by either different skill sets, et cetera, et cetera, but I also hear Kelly's concerns too. So. Understood.

Thank you.

Yeah, and I'm not seeing other areas that are this small. So give us the total who's there what's empty What their primary charges and those kinds of things because I don't see anybody any organization this small Having four on this list for other key openings Gone and it's it's really annoying to me. It's not okay with me. I think I've made that clear. So I'll move on to

The some something else I strongly support and so did council unanimously

actually and that is the red light cameras and the speeding issue so I just mostly asked for information before the next work session to be followed up because I'd like to know why things we thought they'd be January of 2025 and then there are August 1 as I remember reading August 1 that they went into effect and those kinds of things was it hard to get the equipment where we asleep at the switch, what took so long to get it. And then I'd like to know the way I read it. I thought we were, I know about the little R2-D2 things that I really strongly support that we're moving around. That's a new program. But I thought because of the change in state legislation, we were also adding more, able to add more speed cameras on different arterials and more red light cameras. And I didn't see that focused on. So can I see, are those all in place? And you can address anything you want tonight. I'm just taking the pressure off, so if you want to get it in writing, because I want real detail, I thought we were adding more red light cameras and speeding cameras as well.

Yes, we can absolutely follow up on that with all of the specifics. I will say at a very short level, the delay was a delay with the vendor. So that was the six-month delay. And then yes, we have added those cameras at many intersections as well. And my understanding is that the revenue shortfall is sort of a collective of those two things. But we'll get a more detailed breakout for you by the second work session.

Okay. And then to move this, my part along, not to move anybody else's along, I may have some follow-up questions.

Okay. I just want to, I found it now. And so how many intersections, just details, how many intersections we've added, red light, camera, and all of that. And then there's a statement, the very last statement in the whole memo, citation issuance and payment trends continue at the current pace observed. The revenue shortfall is expected to grow. I'd like to know later on what you mean by payment trends. Hopefully, you know, people are paying.

and then also this is my opportunity to lobby council and the organization to try to change

the legislation that's had the tickets for the cameras stuck at $40 for a very long time which isn't much of a disincentive for a lot of people in this town running red lights or speeding to work with the legislature on that because it takes my understanding is it takes legislative action

And the last couple little ones that I noticed, historically this council and the previous council was really into maintaining the Poudre River flows. So $140,000, I'm just bringing it to the public and council's attention if they didn't see it, $140,000 cut to delay the Poudre River flows initiative and to reduce general fund support for river staff work. That's been fairly important to this council.

So they're adding up to me that you might have to look elsewhere, depending on what we see by the time it comes to us for the fourth vote.

And then I'd like to know what the reduced hours at the Timberline Hard to Recycle Center will mean in writing, not tonight,

and what the not filling a code compliance officer, what their duties were and what that will mean in writing,

not tonight for the time for council and all of us and that's it thank you and

and I am concerned about those things but the overall work product I have

different values in the work product the overall work product is just very very

good and so I want you to hear that part value differences yeah Jenny do you do

Yes, I did. Thank you so much. I interpreted the budget shortfall in our red light camera program as a good news item because it means that the behavior changed quite rapidly, more rapidly than we had intended. So I'm not sure we need to work with the legislature to increase those fines. It feels like, and we need more data probably, that, and I'd love to see it, I'm sure we have it, that the $40 is effective. And it isn't a money making venture, it is a please don't do that, we really want you to slow down. And it feels like we had over anticipated the rate at which that would fall off. So to me, that's a good news item, even though we budgeted more than we were bringing in. That's that's also very positive. So I would just put that two cents in for that. And thank you to our police services who have implemented that and brought us all the good data to vote on that. So that's my two cents on that stuff, on that front.

Thank you. Thank you. Melanie? Yeah, thanks. I want to echo thank you for the hard work. And hard work in that it's a lot of work. And also it sounds like these are conversations we've not had to have of this nature in a very long time. Some follow-ups on the red light camera, and I am hearing that we don't have enough data at this point to determine if the trend that we've seen thus far is stable. That being said, I'm wondering, looking at this, and then another example was how quickly folks caught on to the plastic bag moratorium previously that we did staff. Are we thinking about recalibrating moving forward how we are staffing these kind of initiatives focused on behavior change because it does seem if this trend is stable like Fort Collins residents catch on to change pretty quickly and then sometimes maybe we have overstaffed a little bit with regard to educating and enforcing and I don't know if I even need an answer to that but it just seems like that's something we need to be mindful of because I know it's

certainly based on this experience I think that's something that I can say is the city's chief financial officer will influence my thinking as we look at, if we look at any behavior change programs in the future, maybe, you know, phasing in some of the expenditures

as the revenue trends become more clear. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we're clearly geniuses in four columns and we just catch on to things very quickly and that's wonderful. But, you know, we did potentially put ourselves in a tough situation and that we were anticipating people needing a A LOT MORE GUIDANCE THAN THEY NEEDED. LET ME SEE HERE. I WAS WONDERING IF YOU COULD GIVE ME A LITTLE BIT MORE INFORMATION ABOUT HOW THE $120,000 INVESTMENT IN THE TAX AUDITOR MIGHT HELP GENERATE REVENUE?

YEAH, WE HAVE LOTS OF INFORMATION THAT WE CAN SHARE ON THAT. BUT I'LL LET JEN QUICKLY ADDRESS THAT NOW. AND WE'LL CERTAINLY, WE HAVE SIGNIFICANT INFORMATION WE CAN PUT IN A FOLLOW-UP MEMO AS WELL.

SURE, YEAH. AND WE'RE HAPPY TO PROVIDE MORE INFORMATION ON THAT. But in general, our historical averaging is I think around well actually I'd probably have to double check that before I give you information that's not correct. But on average, a sales tax auditor is going to bring in significantly more revenue than how much their cost is, their salary and their benefits. And we currently compared to other cities in the front range have still a fairly lean sales tax department. And so we don't think by adding one more that we're having too many auditors on our team. Thank you.

Audit revenues one time. And one of the things that we'll put in the follow-up information is if you look at just a snapshot in 2024, other cities on the front range also got a larger proportion of their sales and use tax from audit revenue generally than we have. So that also leads us to believe there's space to expand that program.

Okay. So not being a person steeped in business and finance, it sounds like there is sales tax revenue out there that we're not collecting, to put it very simply, and that this auditor would help us find it?

Yes.

Okay. Sorry, I needed to really bring it down. I appreciate that. And then just a few questions moving forward. I do want to echo the support for our Immigration Legal Defense Fund and our Eviction Prevention Fund. And I just, I think, again, for the amount of money we're investing, it's a lot of bang for the buck, in addition to other revenue or other sources of support for those kinds of programs going away at other levels. And this is a place where we can directly impact and take care of our residents. I know that it's a tough thing to hold on to, and I think it's a value. But I was curious if we have done a program inventory or if that's coming up. I think we had similar conversations at a previous work session around it's hard to talk about cuts when we don't have that holistic viewpoint of where things are. And I think that's coming up with the budget. But is that something that's planned, kind of a comprehensive program inventory?

Yes. I know we had some discussions about that, I believe, at the work session in August on the new budget process. we do have a goal to really be able to have a program inventory that documents service levels and that would give council information in a budget process about directional changes in service level and what those impacts would be. As we mentioned back in August, I don't anticipate we'll have that fully in place ahead of the next two-year budget cycle, but that is a goal that we are working towards in conjunction with the new budget process.

Okay, absolutely. And I feel like a broken record, but I just, for me, I just, I really want to see it all laid out to where we have a really strong understanding of why we're doing what we're doing. And then similarly, like a capital replacement plan, do we have that in place? Or is that something that's going to be a piece of our reimagining of the budget?

Yeah, so there are a lot of different elements of our capital improvement program around certain funds. Some areas of the city are more sophisticated than others. I do think that a large area of focus in future budget cycles will be, you know, knowing in past years that for a lot of our asset management, maintenance, replacement, We have been reliant on one-time general fund reserves, particularly for a lot of our governmental side operations. I think that will be a significant issue that council will need to discuss in the next two-year budget cycle.

Okay. Thank you. Those are all my questions. I guess I just wanted to once again recognize the work that you've all been doing and then also at the departmental level. I know the department leaders have been asked to really dig deep and figure out where they can be more efficient. So I know this is a heavy lift across the organization. So thank you

Yeah, Susan Yeah, um Do we know the amount of money this shortfall is for the that the immigration fund is going to be experience experiencing? Is there a figure on that?

So the reduction for the

Immigration fund from what was planned in the 2026 budget I think it's $22,000.

Okay, so here's my thought. I'm not sure whether council, I know everybody has had to pony up

their fair share of cuts, of budget cuts, and, you know, kind of painful. I'm not sure whether council has, though, and council does have a developmental fund

that we use, And I'm wondering if that could be used could be reallocated to help the

Immigration fund as I know I shouldn't say I know I assume that we're all wholeheartedly in support of that And I'm just proposing that perhaps that could help us get them back on board

Yeah, and for the 14th, we'll certainly bring back some options on that $22,000 for council's consideration

All right. I'm not sure how much that we have in there.

I think the total count, I'd need to pull that number up, but I think that total council training is around, I can't remember if it's 30 or 60,000. I'm sorry, I'll confirm 30. 30. Yeah, I think it's 30. And also we have, I want to acknowledge, taken some of the counsel out of your normal conference and training for things like NLC. We did take out a fall, council's fall lobbying trip. That is something that we reduced out of the council budget as part of these reductions as well. And again, you know, I'll say that coming forward with these recommendations, because we took pretty much all of the 6% reductions outside of layoffs or reduction in force, I don't have other choices to put before you tonight, but that will be part of our work as we go back To bring forward some another option or two for you all to consider and we'll certainly look

Across the board I would feel good about that if we could look at it My son always has when he's gone through budget cuts as well During his career and he has an expression that says that everybody needs to throw a little meat in the pot And I think that at least for my part anyway I would love to see us throw some meat in the pot. So if it could be considered, that would be great. I appreciate it. Thank you. Yeah. Jenny?

Thank you. Yes. Remember when we did that right away, Susan, just to remind us all that we all took

whoever was planned for a conference or two this year was asked to remove one of those, and everybody complied immediately. And so every, out of that, we can get Rupa to get us the final, the numbers that we have now. So it started at 30,000 and then we asked everyone to please cut out one of their trips and everyone did. So we did immediately lead by example

and whatever's left in that pot, I think we can look at that number and see that we would like to forego the rest of it as well.

Yeah, and I was able to get that, that number and uh to clarify and this is where it got a little confusing um you may all recall we used to have sort of a separate development fund and then a conference fund and we merged those so it was actually a sixty thousand dollar um fund that you all had that's now um we did twenty twenty five um one-time reductions as the mayor is acknowledging where um everybody kind of helped without belt tightening and now moving forward that's gone from 60 to 40,000 so there has been a reduction certainly in what council is stepping up to do as well and again we'll we'll keep looking for other areas based on tonight's conversation

great right and that's and that's the combined fund yeah thank you for that clarification kelly

great i just had a few additional questions um kelly with your comments i could only find two FTEs that were being cut for environmental services the data analysis and the specialist what were the other two?

Yeah, so what I have here I was gonna back clean up later, but I'm glad you asked that it's actually four and they have them under different categories under on tonight's agenda they mentioned Within sustainability services reductions include three vacant positions related to data analysis and project management but that's not as clear as when you go over to attachment one on the document from the 18th.

And under environmental services, it lists data analysis, environmental sustainability, director of environmental sustainability, lead specialist environmental sustainability, because everybody around here has to be a director, a lead, or a senior, and then a senior specialist environmental sustainability.

So I didn't make up the list. There's four listed here. Some are frozen. Some are some other definition, but that's the four that are on the chart.

Which document are you looking at?

September 18th, 2025. Work session memorandum.

So I think one overarching clarification, and again, we can talk more about these specifics if you want to dive into that. But just an important clarification overall. all, we did provide you a list at the request of counsel of all positions that are currently frozen. Because I want to acknowledge that, again, having these frozen positions in the organization, people are going to feel some impact in service. We're doing our best to shuffle and to reprioritize as we can, but there will be some impact of that. If there's a position that's on that frozen list that is not on your attachment that shows up as a position that's being eliminated it means that that position will be unfrozen and rehired in 2026 at some point we'll do that in a phased approach but that maybe wasn't as clear as it could have been so i do want to just be clear if you're looking at the list of currently frozen positions those are not all positions that are going away the only ones that are going away Are in the list of services that we provided you today the sort of cross-reference then of what's frozen But not on the go away list will become unfrozen in 2026 in a phased approach. I don't know if that helps at all, but no Okay, well, I think yeah in writing would be helpful I just was trying to follow along with you So thank you both everyone for the clarification and we'll get the follow-up in writing. Okay, great. Thank you And then I just had a few other questions Yes Kelly did you have

Oh, I was just going to say that, and Caleb and what City Manager just said, Kelly just said, positions on this list are currently vacant and administrative frozen. I just want to emphasize this. There is a monthly exception process whereby the list of frozen positions and any new positions that are vacated over the month are reviewed for possible approval to hire.

I just want to reiterate what you're saying. Some of these could come back online sooner than your 12-month thing caught. A year is a lot of time for a council member that things won't be back to normal for a year. It could happen sooner than that, depending on what management and council decides.

Thank you. And one thing I miss saying is, well, with a budget in sustainability services, it's 91% personnel. We really had to look at, you know, where we might trim personnel. We really wanted to stay true to the city's values of looking at vacant positions in order to maintain the variable or programmatic budget to not see a reduction of service there. And I'm also happy to announce that there were some exceptions that recently went through. So on net, the headcount in environmental services has gone up because we've recently been able to hire through dedicated and restricted revenue sources. So we are maintaining the levels of service there, but we did put personnel vacant positions forward in order to meet our 6% reduction target.

And what I need clarified, thanks, Council, in that memo is which of these are frozen and which are under the eliminated category. I don't need that tonight, but it'd be nice to see that maybe it's zero and I'd like to see that

We'll put that together and follow up to make sure it's clear for everyone. Okay, great. Thank you

I just had a couple other follow-up questions. Um, it looks like we're Not rehiring two of the hope team officers and I'm just wondering why hope team versus I don't want to say a regular officer

But a non hope team officer

Yeah, I'm happy to answer that. And I know Chief Sabota is here as well. So you may recall that the HOPE team has been functioning as initially a pilot team. With this budget, we were in 2026 going to essentially make that an ongoing team and backfill to patrol officers. So what this does is still keeps two patrol officers, I'll say essentially on loan to the Hope team and Doesn't backfill the patrol officers. So we won't see a real change in service from the Hope perspective But it is more about the internal flexibility within the patrol team and how those officers are deployed. Okay, that's super helpful

Thank you. And then with the grocery rebate now with all of it coming out of the pilot from Connection. I remember at Finance Committee there was a helpful chart about just doing the smaller amount and the impact that's going to have. Can you, for the first reading, can you provide the chart with if we did the $415,000 from it?

Yes, we can provide an updated chart on that. And we'll include what I described tonight, which is our projected spending trends in this year and next year, which which will which will show up pretty similar in that position where we were in council finance committee

Okay, that'd be very helpful. Thank you And then the legal defense funds I just had a clarifying math question Is that five percent of the city's contribution or is that five percent of the total that includes a hundred thousand from the? the loan the fund the grant

That is the city's contribution. Okay, great. Thank you

I I know that twenty two thousand is gonna be hard to find but I I think I

I agree with what's been said my issue is that those two funds illegal defense funds and the eviction prevention fund should have been Included in my opinion in our original budget and they were added by council and the only way we could figure out how to add It was through one-time funds but based on council priorities I really feel like those should have been part of ongoing programming instead And so now to come back and reduce it because it's one-time funds just doesn't really sit right with me So I would like a way to figure out how we can keep both of those programs. And then overall, I just hear from council and myself that it's helpful to have the additional information from council finance about what the reductions are going, you know, 22 from legal, 81 from the housing grant fund. However, what's unclear and what I hear from council is that it's unclear what that impact is. So when we talk about $22,000 from legal and eviction prevention, what does that mean for a year? Is that an estimated number of people less served? Is it less legal service? For the $81,000 reduction, the grant programming, where are we going to see that $81,000 reduction impact? I don't want to have a huge lift, but I do think it would be helpful to get some, you don't need to write a paragraph for each one, but just some clarification on what that actually means in real time for 2026. Is that doable? Yes. Okay. Okay, great. Otherwise, of course, great work. This was super easy to follow and understand. I hope the public thought so as well. This is not the most ideal situation, but I do think that the city and the staff are approaching it with real clarity and thought and really thinking about what's best for our community as we try to figure this out. So thank you. Anything else? Okay. Do you have what you need? oh jenny

sorry about this so i i i whoops there's some noise in the background there um uh i i was remiss in not complimenting staff i mean we see um i'm actually in new york at climate week and i've been talking to cities all day and what they're doing and how they're doing it and i will just i know i'm like a cheerleader for fort collins and i can't help it but i mean i think that the work that you guys have done to really do this work and cutbacks every city i've talked to today is is undergoing budget cuts and some more drastic than others but i think through our careful and conservative budgeting in the past is really putting us in good stead now even though we are in a more of a retraction phase it's it i i feel like the level of services won't be um very impactful for the residents of our community and so i'm just shouting out to not just the good work tonight but uh all past councils and staff that have been pretty restrained in our budgeting so that we could save for a rainy day and and take care and be more resilient um in our in our increasingly volatile future so i'm just saying thank you very much thank you great do you have

Yes, I think we are clear on the follow-up items and we will have all of This prepared for the October 14th work session. Okay, great. Thank you. Does council want to break before our next item?

I think it's kind of a lengthy presentation. So yeah, we'll take a five to ten minute break and come back

Welcome back and we are ready to move on to our second item All right, wonderful. So this next item is on mobile home park oversight and enforcement. And back at the table by popular demand, our Chief Sustainability Officer, Jacob Castillo, is going to kick us off with this one.

Very generous. Thank you, Kelly. As Kelly said, I'm Jacob, the Chief Sustainability Officer. I'm joined by JC Ward and Marcy Yoder from our Housing and Community Vitality Team. I recognize that title may be different. So just a real quick update. The Housing and Community Vitality is a blending of two teams, Neighborhood Services, which earlier this year migrated from Planning, Development, and Transportation to Sustainability Services. And that is reporting to the same person as our Social Sustainability. So those two teams are rebranded as Housing and Community Vitality. and their leader just started last week. His name is Chad Wright. He's back here in the audience. And Chad comes to us from Colorado Springs. He was recently the executive director for the Colorado Springs Housing Authority. He did that for a dozen or so years and had worked with the city of Colorado Springs prior to that. So deep knowledge and experience. But that's the housing and community vitality team. That is not necessarily what we are here to talk about tonight. We are here to talk about mobile home parks. So while there's three of us at the table tonight, I just want to say that the work that we're presenting represents a number of different teams and commitments from across the organization. All of the things that we're presenting, the recommendations and the data have been vetted and ultimately supported by a number of leaders from across the city. And I'm happy to share that leaders within mobile home parks themselves have seen this and are supportive of what we're bringing forward. Our focus tonight is going to be on some of the activities and interventions.

We are really focused on getting to the root cause and addressing the things that will be most impactful in people's lives. I feel like I'd be remiss to bring this up if we hadn't just had the budget conversation. We are not here asking for new resources. We will do everything that we can to live within our means to be both efficient and effective with the use of our resources.

and we're going to have to be creative to find some additional resources to fully implement what we'll be presenting tonight. So as we look at the broad portfolio of work

underneath the city, we've heard from council that this is something you want to prioritize. So with that, I'm going to hand it off to JC to jump into the presentation and show you the work that

we've done over the past several months. Thank you so much and thank you council members for the opportunity to speak with you tonight. The feedback we're seeking is would council like to move forward with a mobile home park licensing program that supports expanded enforcement strategies and are there additional outcomes or strategies that council would prioritize besides those in the staff recommendation. Tonight's presentation will cover background comparison of oversight and enforcement authority by property type strategies and approach to overcome disparities and outcomes and the next steps based on a staff recommendation and then our feedback sought mobile home park enforcement work aligns with council priorities

and with housing equity and water efficiency strategies

as you know mobile home parks continue to be an important housing choice in fort collins they are private unsubsidized naturally occurring affordable housing that means that the property

itself is private property also the infrastructure is private and that makes the owner responsible

for maintenance repair and assessment of things like water infrastructure streets fencing and most safety lighting in the city limits of fort collins there are approximately 1400 home sites in 10 mobile home parks nine of those parks are large enough to meet the state's definition for a mobile home park and as a refresher from our february work session this is the distribution of complaint categories from our Fort Collins residents to the Colorado Mobile Home Park Oversight Program from 2020 to 2024. This year, there have been complaints from three mobile home parks in Fort Collins, but those didn't impact the distribution of the complaints. In Fort Collins, different property types have different oversight responsibilities, regulation, and enforcement, and this can lead to some disparate outcomes, particularly in mobile home parks. Differences in the property types impact some neighborhood governance, with mobile home park residents not having input into their community rules, unlike we see in some of our HOA governed neighborhoods. Mobile home parks also lack minimum training standards for their managers, where a broker's license for real estate and continuing education is typically required for all other types of property managers, including those for most of our multifamily units. The private infrastructure in mobile home parks is maintained by the owner, as I mentioned, and has limited government oversight and intervention authority. So in these next few slides, we're going to dive into some of those differences across the property types and neighborhood types. Our analysis of the current state took a look at the three most similar property types, so mobile home parks, single detached residential, and multi-unit attached homes, focusing primarily on how they are regulated and who has what enforcement authority in each one. under the land use code mobile home park shares some requirements with both of the other property

types now land use code does address the when neighborhoods are built so these are the requirements at the time of build or as neighborhoods are redeveloped the average mobile home park in

fort collins was built in the late 1960s so they would comply with land use code requirements from that time the requirements on this table do apply to any new mobile home parks or parks that are redeveloped. Under the current land use code mobile home parks are most similar to single detached homes but changing the land use code to align mobile home parks completely with any of the other property types would not actually resolve our resident complaints or give us any additional enforcement mechanisms.

And speaking of enforcement authority, there are three property types also are

varied in their municipal code enforcement authority. No two are exactly alike. If you would like even more details for this table, that's in your materials for tonight. This table shows that the main distinctions in enforcement authority are limits on the city's intervention for private infrastructure. So unlike our comparison for a land use code, for municipal code authority, mobile home parks are the least like single detached homes. Those homes and neighborhoods have public infrastructure, so the streets, the water infrastructure, street lights, that type of thing, those are typically owned and managed by the city, which is not the case in our mobile home parks and not entirely the case in our multi-unit complexes. Neighborhoods with multi-unit attached homes also do have public water service where the public water utility guarantees the quality of that water and maintains the water lines, but unlike those single-family neighborhoods, they often do have private streets where the city doesn't manage their street maintenance, speed limits, or parking. Generally though, for most code enforcement authority, mobile home parks are the most like our multi-unit attached homes, but they are still unique in the city's authority to abate hazardous trees, maintain and inspect water lines, and conduct water billing audits. Oversight authority for issues in mobile home parks is dispersed among the city, the state, through the mobile home park oversight program, and mobile home park owners. There is some overlap between the city and the state. Two gaps emerged during our analysis. One is that both the city and the state lack most authority to directly mitigate problems in mobile home parks. We are typically restricted to assessing penalties to try to force compliance from the park owners. And two, mobile home park owners don't have consistent standards for enforcement, and residents don't have a higher authority to appeal to if they don't think that that enforcement is adequate. For mobile home parks to have comparable outcomes with our other neighborhood types, we have to address these differences in regulation, enforcement, and oversight, and then calibrate our level of service to meet those unique needs. Much like a strategic plan, staff used a funnel design to do this from big picture outcomes to root causes of the disparity to actionable strategies in the staff recommendation to be able to address those. Staff identified mobile home park disparate outcomes in the areas of habitability, accountability, and empowerment when compared to other neighborhood types. The root causes for habitability issues in mobile home parks are related to the private infrastructure nature of mobile home parks. I hope that's on your bingo card because I'm going to say that about 500 times tonight. For accountability, root causes are related to fragmented oversight and authority, and for empowerment are related to the legal complexities of conflict resolution and barriers to engagement. A cross-departmental city team of rock stars identified and evaluated 88 unique strategies to enhance enforcement and address the root causes of disparities. While most of these strategies are direct enforcement or escalation for the mobile home park owners, which we will get to next, some of these other strategies relate to our city-focused outreach. And staff already started making some progress on those this year in improving shared data collection and analysis, expanding some key education outreach for building services, like beginning to translate our permit applications into Spanish, and creating some templates for common mobile home park projects. We also created some new community consultant opportunities to do some educational assessments in our mobile home parks for nuisance code and began testing water quality for some mobile home park households. The enforcement strategies focused on mobile home park owners address these 10 specific issues where the current level of city enforcement is not sufficient to change the outcomes. To implement the owner focus strategies, authority of some oversight of private mobile home park infrastructure is needed and some level of oversight over the mobile home park owners and managers is also needed strategies were not developed for issues that require a legal determination so things like the validity of a park rule enforceability of lease terms or whether an action rises to the level of retaliation those would still continue to be deferred or referred back over to our mobile home park oversight program this year a neighborhood liaison position was temporarily redeployed as a centralized mobile home park point person. This did increase internal and external coordination, helped us with some priorities for this work, and renewed that conversation around this very collaborative space. But the ongoing redeployment has also resulted in ongoing reductions in service for our other work, so other community engagement and other programs, but we had some very important lessons learned. To fully implement the mobile home park owner focus strategies, the city needs centralized management, a dedicated point person, and an overarching integrated compliance program. And staff proposes accomplishing this through a performance-based mobile home park licensing program. This would be an umbrella to move forward those enforcement components and also prioritize the work. A licensing program would include mandatory registration and data submission, a publicly available data dashboard, certification and training for all mobile home park managers, and completion of their required tasks.

Required tasks for licensing include assessments of infrastructure and mobile home park condition. These are voluntary or not so voluntary if they have to be conducted by the city or a contractor where the mobile home park owner has failed to conduct those assessments.

The cost for those would be charged back to the mobile home park owner. We would also require data submission, emergency abatement and cost recovery from the mobile home park owner for hazardous trees, water and portable toilet access for long water outages, and water infrastructure leak detection for suspected current leaks. It would also establish mobile home park owner enforcement standards for some things like speed limits,

parking policies, and security lighting. We also have voluntary mitigation or abatement, so involuntary abatement and cost recovery for long-term infrastructure issues like tree canopies or those very long-term continuous consumption of water from infrastructure leaks, and then compliance with maintenance schedules. completion of all these program components especially where there's voluntary compliance would lead to public recognition park-wide incentives and a designation as a fully compliant park the proposed enforcement process for these required tasks to address those issues that we saw back on slide 17. enforcement strategies around all those issues were sorted into flow charts of escalating enforcement and do not worry if you can't read the tiniest writing ever on this slide that's just there to give you an idea of what the flow charts look like the full version is in attachment one for the materials tonight and that's for all ten of those issues each of the flow charts was designed with voluntary compliance off-ramps deadlines before escalation to give people time for voluntary compliance required tasks to be completed in order and the ability for each park to move at their own pace so that no park is waiting on another neighborhood or the city to kind of catch up due to resource and staffing constraints a proposed licensing program would begin by addressing only the prioritized issues

and incorporate strategies for more of these issues as the outcomes improve the program would eventually address all 10 of those crucial owner focused areas that we talked about and can even

expand to others as those emerge to set the priorities for the staff recommendation we did really focus on issues that are urgent for life health and safety issues that are frequently reported and issues that could be potentially totally resolved by escalating enforcement

The staff recommendation proposes next steps in four parts. One is centralizing management, two is addressing the most urgent concerns, three is addressing those longer-term prioritized issues, and four is the municipal code recommendations to support the rest of the staff recommendation.

If implemented, these recommendations would address the majority of the core complaints

that we hear from our residents to the mobile home park oversight program. So part one, centralizing management includes the mobile home park licensing program, mobile home park manager

certification, the continuation of the residence rights program, voluntary compliance efficacy assessments to see if people are voluntarily complying and how long that actually takes,

and then a 12-month check-in point so that we can talk about the program and look for any

performance-based recommendations. Part two is addressing the urgent concerns and charging back costs to the mobile home park owner for services where there has been non-compliance in three specific areas, so providing potable water and toilet access for water outages that last more than 12 hours, abating hazardous trees, and detecting and abating water infrastructure leaks that are currently suspected. Part three is addressing and monitoring prioritized long-term issues like water infrastructure maintenance and oversight, the long-term water infrastructure

leak detection notification and addressing any future leaks that are discovered, hazardous tree

and canopy maintenance and oversight, water outage and boil notices. As a little reminder,

these are only the top four of those issues that we prioritized at this time, but the program could eventually evolve to incorporate the others as our staffing and budget allow. And part four are

the municipal code updates to support the staff recommendation to create a licensing program, expand staff oversight and authority, allow abatement of hazardous conditions and charging costs back to the mobile home park owner and prohibiting owners from passing costs of the program or penalties on to residents you may also see that we're removing um municipal code it's for cleanup to remove the mandatory mobile home park rental inspections to align with the other sections of code under the rental housing program this is a staffing assessment to support the recommendation

but it is not an ask for three positions. The key duties that we need for the program to function broke out into three job families

that are related to roles we currently have. That's how this is broken out.

Covering those key duties, how we would do that, what trade-offs we might need to make, that would be an opportunity, as Jacob mentioned, for some real creativity,

efficiency, and a way to really think about our work a lot more collaboratively across the departments. Acknowledging the budget climate, The next slide highlights some potential funding sources to offset some of these costs. To cover the key duties, we could leverage existing staff time, so places where staff

is already doing mobile home park work, but those could be either restructured to be centralized

roles or within the departments could be realigned with shared program priorities. We could also leverage temporary surge model staffing. So the specially commissioned officer role that you see there is best suited for a temporary surge.

In those first two years when compliance rates are expected to be at their lowest. But after that, the position could be rolled into others or those key duties could be rolled up to the point person. The program coordinator duties are also more crucial at the beginning of the program, but with only nine mobile home parks to serve, that really could be hourly or scaled or kind of fit into other folks' roles.

There are also some redeployment strategies to consider. So as I mentioned before, the neighborhood liaison was temporarily reassigned and other similar types of reassignments could be leveraged to launch the licensing program and begin generating some revenue through fees and penalties. I also want to acknowledge that making all these options budget sensitive does require tradeoffs. There was reduced service delivery because redeploying staff does reduce capacity elsewhere. where for our team this year that did mean specifically some lower levels of engagement for our participants and our program service providers for eviction and immigration legal funds. Those are also tied to council priorities. We also might see some shifting workloads. We might see some trade-offs in those. So if our One Water staff or building services staff have to temporarily shift workloads to create educational materials, they lose those hours for frontline work.

and given our budget climate and the exciting discussion you just had about it we are well

aware that we this program could not depend on the general fund alone we need some sustainable

revenue so licensing and manager certification fees would cover portions of the core costs

early non-compliance penalties could help assist with funding those initial staffing needs or

covering the key duties fee for service options like requesting city staff to conduct leak detection in water lines also opens a potential new revenue stream for some of our city's technical experts. And while our grants and partnerships are not fully reliable sources of funding, they can provide supplemental funding. And together, all of these can help create a more balanced long-term approach. And that brings us to the moment you've all been waiting for, council feedbacks on. Would council like to move forward with mobile home park licensing program that supports expanded enforcement strategies? And are there additional outcomes or strategies that you would like to prioritize besides those in the staff recommendation.

Thank you. Council members have comments or questions?

Julie? Yeah, thank you so much. You guys put so much work into this. This is great. I do have a couple, well, yeah, just a couple questions. And one I might regret asking, but you have 88 strategies that you found. so I don't believe they were all listed in here unless they were hidden in places. Is it worth us looking at that list? Like, are they grouped? And you know what I'm saying? Is it or is it just a list of 88 things?

We have both. They are related to the 10 issues. They're also a separate set that are mostly outreach and educational activities that we can implement whether this program moves forward or not. So we really, for the recommendation and the materials, we're trying to focus on what we would need council direction to do. But like having our urban tree ambassadors come out and do a walkthrough for tree health assessments, that's something we could do pretty immediately.

Okay.

I think maybe in your write-up from this council session, if it's easy to just copy-paste it into the memo, that might be helpful.

And then my second question is, you know, I'm just thinking maybe to some lessons learned about when we did the rental licensing.

Is this, have you guys reached out at all to the nonprofits that work with a lot of the residents in our mobile home parks for their reactions to the program?

Absolutely. We've been in contact with our housing nonprofit providers mostly. We've also been in touch with the resident associations, La Familia and the Mevos group, and then individual neighborhood leaders who have been working on some regional collaboration. So we have tried to be as inclusive as we possibly could be. We always say in this work. We don't know what we don't know and I want to avoid any potholes. Okay, great. No, that's great

Thank you so much. That's all I had Other council members Oh, so I guess I should answer your questions. Yes, and

No

Kelly

Yeah, I think it's great work and And a previous council before I got back on this time was, I think was supportive of looking at things we can do for the mobile home park residents and that housing that it provides. And so I'm supportive of what you laid out. And I think it's great and certainly complete work. Thank you.

Great. Melanie? Yeah. Thank you for the hard work. And similar to Julie, my answer is yes and no. I do have some just clarifying questions. So first What are strategies to keep mental or not mental health mobile home park owners and passing costs along to residents? Are there any concrete strategies that work for that?

Sure, the state's mobile home park oversight program also has legislation that prevents those costs for being passed on Some of the specific strategies so that we would want to do to audit that and make sure that's happening is with any rent increase we would also require that they submit data on line item increases and The acceptable answer is not market rate increase like we would need the actual breakout of those. Okay, awesome. Thank you

I'm trying to put them in a logical order Okay, so with the budgetary strategies that you presented and I really appreciate that you were sensitive to our current economic climate What do we anticipate additional cost for this program would be or do we have that number at this point or to put in place this beautiful plan that you presented?

I can maybe pass the cost over to Jacob, but we are mostly looking at trade-offs of existing staff, existing resources. We would need capital at the front if we needed to hire a contractor to go do something, and then that cost recovery, though, would be on staff. Okay.

Yeah, I think maybe the answer is we don't have a number yet, but we need to do some further analysis to say, what can we shift around with an existing resource base to use that most effectively? And there's likely a gap for full implementation.

Right. That's my imagining as well. Okay. So we'll stay tuned for that. Sorry. I had two more questions. What are procedures if, because I know some of the things we've talked about is if things are not brought into compliance, that there will be penalties for mobile home park owners. What is the procedure if they don't comply with paying those fees? I'm going to turn that over to our other friends who do code compliance work. Karen Champagne, would you like to answer? Or is it an attorney question for process of how do we collect?

It might be an attorney question. I don't know. I'm just curious if we have a mobile home park owner who's like no I'm not paying a fee how does that proceed Ted Hewitt is here he's

been supporting the staff people working on this Ted do you have an answer to

that question yeah thank you for the question that would depend entirely how we want to structure the program so I mean we would develop that with staff and probably come up with a process where there's a warning and an enforcement period. And then eventually, there could be some sort of civil infraction imposed or something like that.

Okay. I really love that our plan is if the mobile home park has livability issues, safety issues, and the parks not taking the steps that the city will do it and then we will charge the park owner that being said you know we're talking about the budget for the city and I just want to make sure that we've got a pretty robust process to make sure that we are collecting from the folks who are responsible for upkeep so it sounds like that's upcoming as well okay and then last question is I'm just curious if you know if the county has any similar plans to move forward with some procedures that are similar quite a few of the mobile home parks I know are outside of city limits and I don't know how in step we are with with the county the county is really interested in this

space and has been engaged also through this process they are not quite as far along as we are with mobile home park work but they are very interested in how

this plays out okay thank you so much yeah yeah I would thank you for the

great work. Like Melanie, I'm really curious more about the numbers too behind all of this. And then last week I did attend the Family Center's event with the resident council. And some of the parks were talking about how much they appreciated the managers that they had in place and how they've really worked well with them. And I'm curious how this program would work for the certification for the managers. Is it over time that you take these courses? because they seem very comfortable with some of these new managers, and I'd hate to have that turnover that we've seen in the past.

Sure. The property manager certification, part of the purpose for that is to keep those managers in place. We've seen some really amazing managers come and go for multiple parks, and so we want to give them some professional certification. Also, there would be training related to legislative changes, anything that they need to know, best practice education from some of our technical experts, it would be rolled out over a period of time. There would be some testing or some sort of assessment associated, much like the real estate broker's license. But it would also hopefully help these folks gain good employment, keep good employment, maybe even adjust their salary. Okay. Thank you. Great. I had a few

questions. Can you talk more about the not passing costs on to residents? Say, for example, that they have to have tree work done and it costs $50,000, that can't be put in their formula of how they calculated rent increase?

It could not. That's something that we would bake into our municipal code changes. So much like the state has, because the state isn't doing that direct intervention and repair or mitigation, they're not doing those kinds of cost recovery, but they are penalizing people who are passing that along and then stacking those penalties and sometimes the residents get that money

back. Okay, thank you. And then can you just talk more about the transition from voluntary to we're no longer voluntary? Because I know that, you know, especially with Skyline, we went through, it's a very long process, I think over a year of just trying to work with them. And at some point, how long are we going to work with folks to come up? So can you just talk about kind of what the idea is to move from voluntary to enforcement? Sure. So we've been doing mobile home park work

in this space, mostly focused on voluntary compliance and education for six years now. Because the enforcement program does have some specific deadlines or timelines that we would wait for voluntary compliance, some of the things like data submission, it should be data that's readily available. So giving you three months to do that is pretty generous. Some of the other things, these bigger picture things, we want to help people into voluntary compliance, just like all of our other code compliance structures. So if they need some assistance with leak detection for their water lines, we want to help them do that. We also know that there are some property managers who will probably zip right through all of these. They're already doing these things. It's just a matter of checking the box for them and we really did like the idea of a recognition program. So like a five-star community kind of thing. And so what

about those that have no interest in complying and kind of just do the bare minimum but never actually come into compliance especially with things like trees and water and utilities? Most of those bigger picture

infrastructure issues or things that the city would go in and abate and then charge those costs back. So then it just becomes about the money, but the actual work already gets done. So there aren't really spaces, especially in these prioritized issues, where we're leaving that open for very long-term waits for voluntary compliance, because we do feel like we've already done a lot of that. Okay. The workflows do have timelines. Thank you, Marcy. Thanks, They do have timelines. They're so tiny. I know. I'm so sorry. If you look at it online, you can blow it up. It's a million times better. Okay, great.

And then just some questions just to make sure that it would address some of the things I've heard. One is that in some of the mobile home parks, if a tree damages a car or someone's home, that owner is responsible for the damage even if the park did not maintain the trees. Are we addressing that in the code changes? Okay, great. And then will we be able to still submit the MPOP, the forms on behalf of residents?

Yes. And that program staff, we've got some folks online today if you have questions for them, but they've been very supportive of this and helping us as we've been developing these to say these are spaces where they're also seeing this gap where they can't go in and address these. So they're really interested in how this plays out because nobody else in the state is doing this

quite yet. Okay, that's great because I know that some residents don't want to submit the MPOP form because you have to put your name on it and so you can't have a city or non-profit do it for you so that's great. I think overall I'm hopeful that this will help. I think, you know, talking with folks, the kind of two things that they really wanted and you kind of talked about this different how we're going to structure the staff is they really wanted one point of contact at the city and talked a lot about just trying to figure out who the best person in contact was so hard and so having one point of contact and then just really heavy involvement and oversight and being proactive is really what they wanted to see from the city they were super I will say that they were very appreciative and praised you all's work and they said the city staff were really great and were so they did want to shout you all out and then just the involvement and oversight and being more proactive because you know I think what they would really like is somebody to read through all of their rules and regulations and provide, which is something we're not going to step into, which I think is the right call. But I think just being able to be more localized instead of sending everything to the state is going to be a good thing. I think that's going to be really helpful. So I'm hopeful for the program and hopefully it addresses some of these really big issues and we can start to make some progress on those a little bit. Because I think we have for six years really try to work with parks and it's kind of now time to move into compliance. So thank you for bringing this forward. I think it's a good program and excited to see where it goes. Yeah. Anyone else? Yeah, Susan.

One quick question, a comment too, and I had shared before the presentation that I can remember back working with one particular mobile home park and wringing our hands and wondering what it is that we were going to do to help the people there and to see how far you've come and the work that you've done and this plan that's, I mean, amazing. I just want to thank you for that. But I do want to ask you, how did you solve the problem of the residents who basically were forced when the property managers transitioned into having to pay their rent online versus giving a check? How did you solve that problem or work with them on that?

For that particular park, the community center put in some laptops and some other desktop computers and had center hours where they would have it staffed so that they could assist people. We also have some friends at the library who always have access. And then the housing fairs that some of our nonprofit providers were doing were also set up at the library and could help people with that payment process. Sure.

just one more follow-up question i don't think i um and i apologize i didn't hit this before so the water quality issue um i know that is been talked about in one of the parks in district two so i'm having a little trouble i think maybe understanding where our jurisdiction is going to end and other begins um yeah can you talk about that a little bit and i may have a follow-up

question sure so a lot of the water quality issues are right now suspected to be related to water line maintenance some of those water lines who knows when the last time they were flushed were that's going to create some of the discoloration or some of the weird smell or texture for some of that cdphe has a pretty comprehensive program for that kind of compliance so the certified water operators already submit water quality testing if the park is over a certain size or if they are a certified water operator. Unfortunately, sometimes when it meets the minimum standard, it still smells weird or it looks weird. So that's kind of the space where we have the opportunity to work with the mobile home park oversight program and CDPHE to advocate on behalf of those residents to say, we know that this is the correct answer, but it's not really a great answer. So how do we get over just the minimum? So we would rely on our CDPHE experts and also some of our OneWater folks, especially the water quality lab has been amazing to work with and already started doing some of that in-home water quality testing as they have capacity. So there already is more of that integration locally and trying to work with the state to get that resolved. And so for those that may not know, what is CDPHE? Oh, sorry, Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.

Those are our water quality folks. So are they in a budget shortfall type situation as well? like I'm thinking about I mean so the tree example is a good one we can come in we can fix that if there is a water quality issue and it has to do with well do we know are there lead pipes in some of these places possibly no we're sure of that okay that's good to know is that just something we'd have to wait on CDPHE to get for the enforcement or would we go in and fix it

ourselves? It depends on what it is. So right now, much like with the water leaks, right now we can make some assumptions about continuous water consumption based on that 5 million gallons a month that's being lost in her mobile home parks. It's probably from the water infrastructure. It might be from the households, but it might also just be actual 24-7 consumption. And until we have that assessment, we don't know which lane to pick. So that's kind of how the water quality shakes out. We start with this water infrastructure repair, maintenance, making sure that's in good shape and seeing if that resolves the water quality issues if not then we move on to that second track with cdphe of trying to pinpoint where the problem is exactly what is the problem and getting that resolved so they do have some assistance for that also our one water folks have been really great about best practices and some guidance for us and the park managers okay thanks

yeah kelly thank you a quick follow-up thanks for asking the water question um it's kind of sad in 2025 if i heard you correctly that if people they can make the minimum requirements according to the state or who's ever in charge of that and the and the water either looks funky smells funky or both did i hear you right wow that's sad in 2025 and fort collins and did you say that after working with the state um and they meet minimum standards we're going to attempt is there anything we can do to attempt to take care of that problem?

I would leave what we would do to our experts with our OneWater friends and with CDPHE, but yes, we would want to start tracking down where those issues are, closing off those avenues, removing the barriers, and then moving on to the next inquiry. So trying to get that source pinpointed.

So just to confirm, we're not going to ignore it?

We are not going to ignore it.

Great. Thank you.

Oh, hello, Andrew. Welcome our friend Andrew Gingrich from One Water.

Hi. Yeah, Andrew Gingrich, Director of Waterfield Operations. Good evening, Council. Yeah, I think a first step for us is, and this probably wasn't in the presentation, but the water that we provide at a very high standard in the city of Fort Collins goes through a master meter into the mobile home park. and then the infrastructure within the park in both wastewater and water are managed by the park and owned by the park, as I'm sure you all know. And so I think one of the things that I brought forward of how we could help is what data do they have on their system? Does that property management company even know what types of pipes they have underneath the ground? If we can start sharing data with them and they can share data with us, we can help evaluate what current practices they're doing what current maintenance they're doing see how that aligns with cdphs regulations federal regulations america waterworks regulations and guidelines and we can kind of almost be coaches and kind of like help them talk them through things they may not even know what kind of a flushing program they might want to do or how to alleviate issue they're seeing. And that could be in the system within the park. The thing with like odor and taste, we even get some of that in some of our old townhouses that have just really old pipes within the home. Again, we give the water to that house at the meter outside. Once that water goes in the house, it's that customer's water and kind of their issue to fix. That doesn't mean we don't come in a capacity to try to help that customer, even in a residential house, kind of work through the problem they have. Now there is a point where we get to of we can't go fix your pipes in your house for you. We can't call a plumber for you. But we can give you as much advice and kind of subject matter expert opinions as we can and kind of go from there. So that's kind of what we were thinking about of how we could get involved. If there is persistent water use within the park that's maybe seems above and beyond just kind of 24-7. You know, people may have different schedules within the park so there might be faucets on all the time people have different work shifts if it does seem excessive that's where my team who is very capable at leak detection could maybe come and provide a service for a fee and just try to help pinpoint now we would have to have some of that data on what type of pipes are there because we can't do accurate leak detection unless we know what type of pipes and materials we're we're trying to kind of hook up to so i don't know if that helps bring some context but i think that's where my head was going and working with jc and everybody here of how can how can we as a utility step in when we do really have that clear boundary of where we sell the water to them and then it gets distributed through their system and they would also have an operator responsible charge just like we do with our distribution system that should already be working with the state and i think also understanding who that company or that person is and maybe us and our staff could work with them to just have a better relationship with the person that's supposed to be operating these utility systems so yeah

thank you anyone else okay do you all have what you need great thank you so much yeah thank you

okay are we ready for our last item which wheels go where

yes if we can have just sure thing a minute or two to switch out our staff teams here

we will bring up Courtney DK and Rachel ! and Rachel!

All right! All right.

If you are ready mayor pretend we will go ahead and get started so I am going to turn it over to drew Brooks who is our Deputy director of planning development and transportation to set the groundwork for this particular item

Good evening everyone council on Fort Collins as you know this council and previous councils have prioritized accelerating our shift to after active modes of transportation as as shifting trips from automobiles to active modes is critical to achieving our climate and vision zero goals. In recent years, we've seen the rise in popularity and development of a wider variety of small human-powered and electric vehicles, such as scooters, skateboards, and one wheels. Supporting the use of these new vehicles provides community members with more mobility choices. People who use these modes have a lot in common with cyclists, in that the vehicles are agile, low profile, and the riders are particularly vulnerable in traffic crashes. However, most cannot currently be ridden the same places that bicycles can be ridden, leading to a fragmented network. This is also a timely discussion, as this was also a key policy area in July when DK was here with adoption of the Strategic Trails Plan. Our FC moves and park staff are looking forward to discussing options for supporting the use of these vehicles while balancing the needs of all road and paved Trail users Tonight's presentation is high level and we plan to return next year with possible regulatory changes depending on the outcome of this discussion With that I will turn that over to Rachel Ruhlin our transportation planner with FC moves

Thank you Rachel Rulon with FC moves and I have here with me DK with parks so which

wheels go where we're here to give you an update on this project which is exploring rule changes to some different kind of vehicles to support our mode shift goals this project aligns with a couple of council priorities and several of our city plans the priorities are the 15-minute city by accelerating our shift active modes and modernizing the city charter it aligns with the vision zero goal of the strategic plan this is a direct outcome of the active modes plan and the strategic trails plan and it supports the mode shift goals of our climate future and the vision zero action plan so we are looking for feedback from you on three questions some new definitions some behavior rules and some options that we've been exploring this project started over a year ago we have done a lot of community engagement and research we've heard from several advisory boards tonight we are looking for feedback from you and then we're going to take all this information and work with partners throughout the city to draft ordinance get some recommendations from advisory boards and then hope to bring you

something in 2026. So the first question we have for you is the which wheels part of which

wheels go where? Is there the new definitions we've been exploring? So we're looking at definitions for human powered vehicles and lightweight electric vehicles. And this is That is not the pointer. Okay. So this is the important part of the definition of lightweight electric vehicles is the 20 miles per hour. So that's where we draw that line. If it can go faster than 20 miles per hour, it's not a lightweight electric vehicle.

We have definitions in our code already for bikes, e-bikes, and e-scooters, and those definitions won't go away. But having these two new categories will help us to really simplify the code, and then things that are, these vehicles that are similar to each other, can then, we can regulate them similarly.

As new things are being invented all the time, a few years ago, we'd never seen a one-wheel or an e-unicycle. So as new things are invented, if they meet these definitions, they would just fall into those categories.

we wouldn't need to constantly update our code to accommodate new types of vehicles.

So we have done a lot of community engagement and research. This is two pretty large attachments

that were in the agenda packet. I'm gonna summarize in a single slide.

So the community engagement was mostly done in the form of a questionnaire.

We got almost 1500 responses to that.

there was one question that was required to be answered and that was just do you

have any concerns about this topic a little over half the people who took who

took the survey said yes I do have concerns We then went on to ask some follow-up questions about, well, what are your concerns? I hope that some of you took this survey, too.

So, and then there was an opportunity to leave a comment. There were over 700 comments. We read every comment.

And then we also wanted to make sure that we were hearing from a broad spectrum of the community.

So we asked people, you know, how do they travel? And so we are hearing from people who drive, people who bicycle, who walk.

and we did hear from people who ride e-scooters and skateboards.

We also heard from a good spread across many demographic categories.

We've done some focused engagement, lots of conversations with staff from many city departments, external partners, lots of conversations with Colorado State University and the Downtown Development Authority, and then we've had feedback from seven advisory boards. In research, we did a crash analysis that focused on skateboards and scooters, e-scooters.

We learned about the technological and legal challenges of enforcing behaviors, particularly speeds.

For people riding these small vehicles at low speeds, you don't have to have a driver's license to ride these,

and enforcement on outside of our street network. We learned that from our Fort Collins police, from our CSU police and the parks and natural areas rangers. And then we've learned, we've been investigating

what are other communities doing and what are their experiences. Particularly, we've had some conversations with Boulder because they made some changes similar to what we've been exploring in 2021.

So our second question for you tonight has to do with the behaviors. How do we govern behaviors?

We already have a set of rules for people riding bikes, e-bikes, and e-scooters, like obey traffic laws, yield to pedestrians, no careless riding. An important one is you can't dart out into the path of a moving vehicle, even at a crosswalk, where you have the right of way. You still can't do that.

You have to have safety equipment on your vehicle.

And there's lots more rules than this. This was just a few I put on the slide.

So we think, you know, in the interest of simplicity, we would have one set of rules for all human-powered and lightweight electric vehicles rather than a set of rules for bikes and e-bikes and another set of rules for other things.

So then the third question we have for you tonight is the where part of which wheels go where.

And so this is the options that we've been exploring.

There we go. So I'm going to show you a series of slides, or of tables. Each table is for a different facility, so this one is for sidewalks. And the first line is these two new categories, human-powered, lightweight electric vehicles. And underneath that, we have the vehicles that would fall into those categories, but

split up the way they're currently treated. So bikes and e-bikes have one set of rules and skateboards have another.

Then under that, we have how these are regulated currently, and then what we're exploring.

So actually, all of the human-powered and lightweight electric vehicles are currently allowed to operate on sidewalks,

and so we're not really exploring any changes to that. This is kind of an interesting example because we generally discourage sidewalk riding.

It's not the safest for the rider or for pedestrians. But we also recognize that although we have an excellent bicycle network, because we are a platinum-level bicycle-friendly community, it's not perfect, and there are times that people are going to choose to ride on the sidewalk, and sometimes that might be their best option.

So we haven't explored prohibiting sidewalk riding, just kind of cleaning up some inconsistency in the code.

Also, we're not exploring any changes to the dismount zone.

So then the next facility is crosswalks.

And right now, if you're on a bike or an e-bike, you can ride through the crosswalk, again with that caveat that you can't just dart out in front of a moving vehicle.

But on any other human-powered or lightweight electric vehicle, you are required to dismount. So we've been exploring lifting that dismount requirement.

So again, simplifying the code, kind of treating things more the same as the way we already treat bikes and e-bikes. And again, this doesn't affect the dismount zone.

So then that brings us to streets. Bikes, e-bikes, and e-scooters are allowed to use streets.

There's no restriction on whether or not there's a bike lane present, but other human-powered and lightweight vehicles are prohibited from streets, so they cannot use the bike lane that is there.

our bikes and e-bikes and e-scooters aren't restricted to the bike lane so there's some

language in there that is essentially puts you in the bike lane probably most of the time but there's also some specific language about you're not required to ride over a hazard and so you can leave the bike lane to avoid an obstacle again of course yielding to traffic

So we've been exploring allowing human powered and lightweight electric vehicles to use streets. And we do hope that our our bike lanes and our bicycle facilities are safe and comfortable enough that people would actually want to ride in them so we don't have to force them to ride in those. I'll turn it over to DK now to talk about paved trails.

Yeah, this is where I come in. DK, Senior Trails Planner.

And we've discussed this with the strategic trails plan previously, and we are exploring allowing lightweight electric vehicles on the park's maintained trails. Currently, they are allowed, I'm sorry, human-powered vehicles are allowed on all of our trails except for Class 3 e-bikes. So we're carrying that caveat forward.

But it's important to note that the Mason Trail does allow lightweight electric vehicles.

the Mason Trail is maintained by the streets department and it's been a good

I think test for us to see how it goes and so far so good no crash results or really any close calls at this point so far and it's been over about a year now so moving forward with this allowed exploring that concept but there are some considerations and if you could thanks there are some considerations we want to discuss so currently and I think we all know this from the reports that we've seen that people walking people disabilities older adults they're perceived there's a perceived lack of safety on the paved trails not by all but by some of our vulnerable users users is that sort of a trade-off people who use lightweight electric vehicles feel safer on the paved trails than they do sometimes on the streets or in bike lanes on the streets where they're where they may be more vulnerable the people that are calling themselves lightweight electric vehicle users really account for a small percentage of overall self-reported trail users and what we're seeing is that the concerns really

center more around the use of e-bike and illegal e-motorcycles and the speed differentials between people walking and biking.

Turn back over to Rachel.

Thanks, DK. So, you know, we talked about simplifying the code, making it easier to understand. So this chart kind of shows, like, if we made it the simplest possible and basically everything was treated the way bikes and e-bikes are currently treated and allowed to ride on that full network, this is what the code could look like. So again, not exploring changes to the dismount zone, not exploring changes to where low power scooters would be allowed to ride, really wanting to firm up what is that line between a lightweight electric vehicle and a low power scooter. As we've had these conversations, it's come to our attention that there are some gaps in this what we're calling low power scooter that probably do need to be addressed. But that's kind of outside the scope of this project. So that might be for a future. So that's the simplest it could look like. But that said, there are still some outstanding questions that we have that we would need to work through as we try to draft some changes to the code. So this is the only time I'm going to mention the resources word, given the discussion we've heard tonight.

There are questions about resources for enforcement, and that would be true for under the existing rules as well as if any rules are changed. resources for outreach considering that we have new residents coming into town

and new students every year DK mentioned speed differentials on paved trails there's also questions about speed differentials on streets so human powered and lightweight electric vehicles are faster than pedestrians and slower than motor vehicles so wherever they are there's going to be speed differentials not all of these come with safety equipment so we'll need to think about how to handle that and some questions about consistency of definitions with neighboring communities and reconciling municipal and state code there does seem to be a broad agreement that continued safety education is the best way to manage issues and that would be to continue what's the safety education that's already begun on the paved trails because say this safety education is more effective and less resource intensive than a an enforcement heavy campaign it does still require some resources so again back to the the feedback we're looking for from you tonight is this new definitions human powered and lightweight electric vehicles any concerns about just expanding those behavioral rules we already have to writers of other human powered and lightweight electric vehicles and then feedback on the options that we've been exploring regarding the streets bike lanes sidewalks and paved trails we are looking for a high level discussion tonight we will be getting into you know doing a deep dive into the code with our with police with prosecutors with traffic operations city attorneys and then of course parks fc moves and natural areas so thank you we look forward to the discussion great thank you thank you what a good presentation do council members have questions melanie

i do thank you so much for the presentation and i i loved reading the outcomes of this because i've seen you all out in the community so much over the last couple years um or maybe the last year or so all of our public events and things so just thanks for all the hard work and then i noticed how many boards and commissions you all presented to and got feedback from so kudos on that i also wanted to shout out one of our community members, Leif, who made the slideshow on the skateboard. He is truly somebody who uses active modes to get all over the community. And so I love that he made the slideshow. So I guess my biggest question, I support most of the changes. I think it makes a lot of sense to streamline. I do echo the importance of education because I do think that speed differential as we move towards allowing more vehicles in different places is important in just the size of the vehicles. Courtesy, safety, those kinds of things I am seeing as an area for growth as we expand. I guess I have a question. I don't know if this is with Fort Collins Police Services or some other department, But I think on our roadways and our trails and our sidewalks, is there a mechanism we could use to assign liability to the person in the larger vehicle? I think there are other communities that have done that. And so, you know, I really do think it's incumbent if you're riding an e-bike and you hit a pedestrian. I don't really care if the pedestrian jumped out in front. You're on the faster vehicle and the heavier vehicle and you have the responsibility to be watching. Is that something we could do? I know it's unusual that we are able to address a crash on a paved trail. And in cases where they are, yeah. To me, it just seems like the bigger the vehicle, the more responsibility you have for utilizing it. And I don't know if that's an allowable strategy.

Yeah, we could certainly look into that. Yeah, it's kind of like the lug nut rule, right, sort of. um yeah and uh we do there is there are laws in effect right now that place the the responsibility on um on the person who causes a crash on the paved trail or within or on the street in a bike lane or whatnot um and so um there is that ability at this point to

issue a citation how is the liability though assigned is it is it like the i don't know is it

If a pedestrian were to step out in front of a bike, would it be their fault? Or is it the person in the larger vehicle, their responsibility?

That probably really is a case-by-case basis and would need to be investigated by an officer to come forward with that information, I think.

I guess I just, maybe this is just a statement of my values, but I think if we're going to be sharing space with various types of vehicles, I think that you assume a higher level of liability when you choose to use a more powerful vehicle. I think that about cars as well. I just think you've got to, it's got to be incumbent on the rider. And so I guess I would just love to have some really clear expectations around that in our education, but that would take us deciding that that's how we want to enforce our laws. So just something I wanted to throw out there, but in general, I'm very supportive.

I thought it was hilarious that with our previous rule you would have to remove your roller skates to go across a crosswalk. And I thought that was a common sense update to our codes. So thank you for that.

Thank you. Anyone else? Julie?

Yeah. Thank you. I agree with Melanie. Like after seeing the yard signs everywhere of which wheel goes where it's nice to see what's become of that. I do have some questions, possibly concerns about the low power scooter, what we're calling that. You know, we are a family that has rad runners. And so those, I just am realizing like, oh, those aren't considered. E-bikes because they're right at that cutoff. So what is informing that data point? Because is it weight? Is it speed? Is it both?

So the 20 miles per hour came from, because we already have that in the definition of e-scooter and class one and two e-bikes. And so to keep that consistent, that seemed to be a logical cutoff. but um yeah we as these conversations have been happening we've been realizing that there's this the the low power scooter is an interesting case and also doesn't really fit very well anywhere um and so we we feel like there we do need to have some discussion about what to do with that maybe after we do this i can add a little bit more onto the low powered scooter

being a state statute definition of a low-powered scooter it's only just the speed but probably more so is the power the wattage being greater than 750 watt it then goes into a new category where legally the the person riding the low-powered scooter should be 16 years old have a driver's license and also be insured for one of those vehicles so that's another I guess difference between an electric assist bicycle, and there's three categories, and a low-powered scooter.

Okay, so yeah, I mean, I'm just kind of like looking through, you know, Rad Power Bikes is a big provider, and a lot of their bikes are 750 watt.

Well, they need to be greater than 750 watts, so they can be up to 750. And, you know, one of the other elements of the education outreach is the consumer education. So right now, the manufacturers are clever, and they can market these in a manner that can skirt around local laws and whatnot. So they could be billed as a Class 1, Class 2, Class 3 e-bike, but a little switch of the, you know, configure the throttle or whatever, and you could all of a sudden have this bike that's able to go 30 miles per hour. and so they're trying to sell them under a multitude of different e-bike types but in actuality they don't meet any of those and so technically we call those out of class and so they're not allowed on any of our facilities. Okay and so how do you like

think about so i have a car it obviously goes faster than 45 miles per hour but i don't go above that you know wherever depending on speed limit so how do you incorporate that into a possibility of a bike that could go faster so how do you incorporate a low-powered scooter into the transportation network well yeah kind of i mean just thinking about like okay sure maybe my bike can go 28 I think 28 miles per hour but I know it needs to go 20 if I'm on a paved trail and so I keep it at 20 right and obviously slow down when we 15

that's the yes that's the that is the courtesy maximum maximum speed limit for for the paved trail system so there is a culture of safety on the trails that We're trying to create the safety education campaign that you've seen the signs now on the trails. We're trying to achieve that new way, that new culture, the courtesy, the etiquette. But there are other facilities where the low-powered bikes can use. They can use residential streets. And I believe that low-powered scooters can use bike lanes. I can't recall. That's transportation. They can use streets. They could just use the streets, but not the bike lane itself. Okay.

And to be clear, in case anyone's scared, I actually do not ride the trail by my house very often. I stay on the streets because that's how I get to Sprouts. But okay. Well, I'm glad you're thinking of all these things. And I do understand that, of course, the manufacturers are going to be clever. It's just interesting to think about our competing priorities here, right? We don't want as many cars on the road and yet we also need to consider what that means on the other end of the spectrum so I like the thoughtfulness you put into that

Yeah, the trails have become somewhat of a victim of our own success by creating a facility that everybody wants to be on And it's people feel the safest but then the trade-off that people you know walking or people with children they feel More intimidated because of the higher speed vehicles So that's what we're also struggling with at the same time. Thank you.

Yeah, Susan. Yeah, quick question about what could you tell me what the policy is for the dismount policy is in Old Town? Yeah. So we haven't explored any changes to the dismount zones. So there are streets that are designated dismount zones and they're stamped on the concrete with the symbol of someone like standing next to a bike and with a skateboard in the other hand. So, yeah, that rule is no wheels. You dismount. I think there's like ADA exceptions, but in terms of the types of vehicles we're talking about, those are dismount. And that's true in the sidewalks and in the crosswalks.

So would that be especially like in Old Town on College Avenue? They're not supposed to be riding on sidewalks and so forth.

Yeah, a dismount zone must also be marked. It has to be signed and marked in order to be a dismount zone. Otherwise, you can ride your device, your e-bike, on a sidewalk elsewhere. But the downtown is a great example of that policy of prohibiting people from riding their device on the sidewalk itself.

Because it can't be white riding on the street correct With the parking as it is that would be so dangerous with the diagonal parking. It depends on your vehicle, right?

Right at the moment if you're on a skateboard you there's really no place to ride in in the downtown area Because you're not a lot on this the sidewalks which are dismount zone, and you're not a lot on the streets

the only problem as usual is the is who's there to to make sure that people don't do it because it seems like they do it a lot you know as as pedestrians are walking downtown shopping and so forth and I don't know I guess that's just the conundrum right that they can do it as long as they don't get caught or unless somebody wants

to tell them you know a citizen it is tough to enforce I remember years ago we would do in saturation events where PD would be downtown and for a period of time would issue citations for the dismount zone specifically and that had a short-term effect and it's high resources and so really I think the safety education approach is the long term and most effective but it does take time to get there and you have to reinforce it's not a one-and-done deal it's something that needs to be evergreen you continue to do it over time within a community to to get to that point of where everyone's practicing the same safety feature our safety practice. Thanks.

Kelly.

My first question, Julie, you have one of these?

It doesn't look like that. But it's powerful. It can carry a lot of groceries.

So this didn't head in the direction that I thought it was going to, but I guess that's no surprise. I thought we were going to

And I don't have a problem with most of the changes. It's about the behavior and the speeds and all that. So I just need a couple clarifications before I get to my concerns. On the streets, the sidewalks, I guess that's the nature of the beast. The crosswalks probably make sense. There's going to be some issues with both. But the streets, with or without bike lanes. So we're saying roller skates and skateboards and all those things can just go along on the street, whether there's bike lanes or not. That's the way I read slide 11.

Right. So that's what we've been exploring. So kind of, again, going back to that, what would be the simplest? So right now, skateboards aren't allowed to use the bike lane at all. our our code right now doesn't restrict bikes to the bike lane bikes and e-scooters can use the street and there's specific language about you know not you're not required to ride over a hazard so you can leave that bike lane if you need to so that would be the question is are we going to restrict skateboards and roller skaters to the bike lane if we allow them on the street will there still be some protection against if there's a hazard in the bike lane what do they do So those are some of the, you know, as we, it could look as simple as that chart that I showed at the end where everything's allowed on all the facilities, but it might not in the end look quite that simple.

I'll get to that chart in a bit because I didn't even read it that way.

So, but I, we, we know I'm somewhat limited in some arenas, so we'll get the clarification on that.

But I think you might be doing, and again, most of these things don't care.

I'm just thinking this particular one, road rage and danger for the roller skate people and the skateboarders, et cetera.

I think you might just be overdoing the simplification a little bit as you move forward. Maybe it won't be as simple as everything's green. That's my feedback on that one.

And if you're going to mention e-bikes, I think even though there's a lot of finesse to this, you should still always say in some places you do and others you don't, bikes and e-bikes, you should say type 1 and type 2 just if it's the public seeing this so they don't think it's everything.

Because I think we've all seen some of those big bike, big tire ones going around where all of a sudden they come by if you're on a sidewalk or even driving. It's amazing how, I don't know if we've had any major incidents yet,

but they go really really fast and they're big and fast so okay um

well i'll just get to the chart it's not my most important part but the number 14 slide

i thought you said everything was allowed but then it goes low power

scooters that those big ones is that what we're talking about maybe that's where i got confused from the big picture yeah the fat tire the big fat tire so that's why this okay okay so skip that one that was easy so i'll get to the part that i thought we were going to do more of and no i haven't i'm told i need to get some hobbies so yeah i'll be on the trails more shortly but um so i guess there's signage but i do read the flagship paper of the state which is the

Denver Post every day and they cover a lot of things and some communities right in Colorado are going to speed limits for their bike. This isn't so why have you not even considered putting up speed limits? There's I think it was Westminster. We can you can do a search but there's people exploring or have done speed limits on bikes and other things in Fort Collins. Why I figured I don't I'm not saying that would be the result but it appears you didn't even

pursue that we explored that um um topic uh and it's it's discussed in i think the report um the feedback we were getting from enforcement was and prosecutors as well was um their their a dislike for having an a speed limit in the ordinance um they the issues were that But having a posted speed limit that could be enforced leads to expectations of patrols and enforcement of that speed limit. And, again, really preferring that safety education approach over an enforcement-heavy approach. So we have explored it, and we could continue to explore that as well.

Well, it would be great to at least talk, because this isn't even coming back for another quite number of months, the issue that won't die, is it would be nice to see how the others are dealing with it, if they actually have implemented it.

Because it just grows tiresome that we talk about things, but, oh, my God, we may have to enforce something,

and then the world ends because we may actually have to enforce something.

if it's a safety issue maybe we should it just grows so tiresome to me in this organization

that we may actually have to enforce something um even if it's um health and safety so that's my

that's my two cents but what are the signs that are appearing along the trails that i'm not on

mostly a lot of the common concerns that we've been hearing about yielding to slower moving. Are these signs we've put up? Sorry, yeah. These are new signs that were created as part of the strategic trails plan. And there are about 10 different messages in there. And we've printed 11 sets of those signs and they've been distributed throughout the system by our park staff. And so they vary in message per trail. And what's nice about them is that we can move them around. So when you do have signage in one place for a long time, people begin to overlook it. And so if you can be dynamic with your outreach, then people will see a different message in the same place and it'll start to resonate. So concurrent with the signing that's in the field, we're also using marketing communications to broadcast the same messaging through electronic dissemination, through social media posts and our webpage and through newsletters and all. All the city communication tactics. So that's our next step at this point is to launch that piece so that people seeing what they see online is the same thing they're seeing in the field. So it's the same messaging. It's consistent.

Well, council is part of this discussion, too, of all the people that you talk to. So what about focusing the enforcement not on necessarily the behaviors, and if that's so difficult, but on the people that have the massive, fast, dangerous things riding where they shouldn't. That's a very small subset of enforcement. Why couldn't you explore ways to deal with the bad players?

You're right, absolutely. I think more consumer education that we can produce to help folks understand what they're buying, and then we do respond to incidents where we hear about folks that have been speeding through and close calls and whatnot. And so it's really hard to be at the right time and right place to catch someone in the act. But I think –

When you say you respond to it, then what do you do?

They go out and look for the – Who's they? Who's they? So those are our rangers. And I'm speaking just about the trails, the paved trail system more than anything. But our rangers will go and respond to an incident.

And so if the person's on one of those really big, fast bikes that is technically illegal for that place and they go tough, what are you going to do about it? What do we do about it?

When they go tough? Huh? Do you say when they go tough?

No, when they say tough, you stop them. You catch them because they live in that area and they keep doing good things. Well, and that is one of the challenges. The ranger goes, because I know the rangers don't have enforcement capability. So if they go tough, what are you going to do about it? What do you do about it?

So the rangers do not have the ability to detain or pursue at this point, and so it's more about the safety education that they can do. They can be issued a citation if they stay to receive that citation. So they do have enforcement power, but they cannot detain or pursue. Okay.

And then are all these things going to also apply then to what's allowed on the paved trails through natural areas?

so no that's a completely different set of rules for soft surface trails and so i said hard trails

i hope we're not even considering that that would be in my opinion nutty but the hard trails they can go through the natural areas these this will pertain to the paved trails that on the paved

trails the only paved trails though okay um and then i gotta ask it because it started just as this council got sworn in,

and that's two years, spring of 2024, and I think we're coming up on spring of 2026 when you say it's going to adopt it. And to me, this isn't complex.

It's value decisions, but it's not complex. Why is it taking over two years? There has to be some complicating factor. This thing, to me, is not a two-year project. Council's running two-year cycles. Um, I, I just need to probe that.

Hmm. Um, I would say it's, uh, maybe because we did this in all in-house, like we didn't hire a consultant to do this. Um, the timing, you know, we like DK was busy with the strategic trails plan update. Um, so we did want to kind of align that timing so that we weren't, this wasn't all coming to you at the same time. So we get the strategic trails plan done. And then this, we actually, we're going to talk to you earlier, and then I had some health issues, so that's delayed it a little bit. And then we just want to make sure that we take plenty of time with this deep dive into the code with our partners in police and prosecutors and attorneys and traffic operations and make sure that everyone is comfortable with what we ultimately bring to you. I think you're taking the time to do it right.

Okay, go ahead. I'll ask the city management in the future when things start at the very beginning of a two-year council cycle that they try to get to an end during that two-year cycle because most things aren't a two-and-a-half or three-year process. Thanks for your work. I appreciate it. Take care.

Tricia? Thanks for the great work. I don't have a whole lot to add, but thank you for being so thorough and really working with all the partners throughout the community to get to this end point. I really like the new definitions that they're evergreen. And, you know, I do think who would have ever thought about that, the one wheel thing or the unicycle. So that's really helpful, I think, moving forward. I also agree with Melanie. That would have been really awkward to stop and take off your roller skates at a crosswalk. So thanks for addressing that. And I don't have any concerns. I really like the idea of the education, changing up the signs and mirroring that with our social media program.

And I do think it like, you know, you put a post it on your mirror and a couple days later you never see it anymore. So changing it up is a really great idea. But yeah, it's great. Thanks.

I'll just say I think it makes sense to keep it simple because I think the space is evolving and you know it's going to be hard to keep coming back and capturing everything and people I think people are going to use these where they want to use them and so if we can make it safe and educational and have some guidelines I think that's more effective than this is allowed and this it just gets too confusing I think for people.

I didn't know I wasn't supposed to rollerblade in the streets without a bike lane

It's too hard to rollerblade on sidewalks. I'll tell you that so You know like people don't know the rules. I'm not gonna go look it up and then so I do think it makes sense to

Keep it simple. I do think that space where if your

Electric powered Modality can go faster than the speed limit then that is something we should look at which is you know if it's those rad powered bikes or I've also seen like a under 50 cc moped in the bike lane because those can't go over 25 miles 20 30 miles an hour so I do think there is some space to do work in

that area where if you're going faster than the vehicle speed limit then then you shouldn't be in the bike lane so I think it's good work I think we're going in the right direction it's you've

talked to a ton of people and ton of our boards and commissions so I think we're on the right path and we'll see where this goes and I think just it's exciting as Julie said it's like this trade-off of we want people not to use their cars and then the space is evolving so what do we do and so I think just making it and facilitating and having a safe environment is the best practice so thank you do you all anyone else and the mayor did drop off anyone else okay do you all have what you need okay great that is our last item does anyone have any announcements seeing none well adjourn thank you good night for cons