City Council Work Session (Meeting video starts at 1:12:54) — January 20, 2026

Good evening Fort Collins and welcome to everyone attending in person and online.

Typically this is our proclamation section of the evening. However, tonight we are swearing in Ann Nelson as our new District 6 Councilmember.

Ann was selected from a highly qualified pool of applicants to represent District 6 until January of 2028.

City Clerk Dylan Coldiron will administer the oath. Ann, would you please come forward?

Okay, if you will raise your right hand, I in state your name.

I, Ann Nelson. Affirm. Affirm. That I will support the Constitution of the United States.

The Constitution and laws of the State of Colorado.

The Charter and Ordinances of the City of Fort Collins. The Charter and ordinances of the City of Fort Collins and that I will faithfully perform and that I will faithfully perform the duties of the office

Duties of the office upon which I am about to enter upon which I am about to enter to the best of my ability to the best of my ability Congrats All right, we can suspend council chamber goals and give her

Yes, thank you everyone for attending council's regular meeting that will begin promptly at 6 p.m. Followed by a work session. Thank you everyone

Good evening for Collins it is 6 p.m. And I call the regular meeting of the Fort Collins City Council to order.

Please join me for the Pledge of Allegiance.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Will the clerk please call the roll.

Conway.

Here.

Francis. Here. Fudge. Here. Hovind. Here. Nelson. Here. Pina Terrell. Paddy Andi.

Here. All right. We have six of us here tonight. We appreciate everyone who has joined us either in person or virtually. I want to remind everyone that we are here for the same purpose, which is the future of our community. I ask that all be respectful and listen to each other's viewpoints and be thoughtful about others as they are speaking in afterwards Will the city please provide the city manager. Please provide a review of today's agenda. Yes. Thank you mayor

Good evening everyone. We do not have any changes to our published agenda The consent calendar includes ten items. We do have one discussion item plan this evening and that is related to making the supplemental appropriations of revenue from our quarter cent capital tax and authorizing the transfer of those appropriations. And then I do want to note that immediately following tonight's regular meeting, we will adjourn and reconvene in a work session, which will take place just right next door in the Council Information Center.

Great. Thank you. We do not have any community reports tonight, so will staff please play the public participation video?

There are three ways to participate in City Council meetings.

In person in Council Chambers, online via Zoom, or by phone.

Anyone who wants to speak during general comment or for any particular agenda item should sign

up in advance at fcgov.com slash council comments.

You can comment on any topic including other agenda items during the public comment period.

or you can comment on specific items when they are brought for consideration later in the meeting.

However, you may only speak on an agenda item once, either during general public comment or during that item-specific discussion.

The mayor will call by name those who have signed up to speak in the order they signed up.

Connect to the internet on your computer or mobile device and join the Zoom meeting.

The link and instructions are on the meeting agenda and at fcgov.com.

Click the Raise Hand button and leave it raised until called on.

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Press star 9 to raise your hand. Please note that public comment is not permitted about any items that could be appealed to

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Information and resources about how to participate in the development review process are available on the City's website.

Finally, please remember that public comment is not a question and answer session, and And all comments should be addressed to City Council, not to individuals.

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Please enter and exit Council Chambers quietly if the meeting is still in progress.

Okay, we will now move on to public comment. To ensure that we have accurate information and to follow up with speakers, we do ask that speakers sign up prior to 5.30 p.m. for public comment.

If you registered online prior to 5.30, you will see your name displayed on the screen, and we will call your name as we go down. If you are a current member of a board of commission, we ask that you please identify yourself as being on that board of commission and whether or not you're speaking on behalf of yourself or the board and commission at this point we have 23 people signed up to speak um and so we will do two and a half minutes for everyone tonight for those in chambers um we just ask that you please keep your um eye on the screen and when you see yourself come up you can go ahead and get in line um and come up to the podium green light means you can be giving your comments yellow light means you have 30 seconds and red we all kindly ask you to stop your comments And then for those that are remote, we just ask that you raise your hand until you are called on. So we will begin calling speakers. And when it is your turn, please come up to the podium, state your name and your general address. All right, so we will stop with Nicholas. And then followed by Jonah.

For the record, my name is Nicholas Guest. I've been a resident in Fort Collins, Old Town since 2009. I'd like to thank this council for their work that has proceeded being here today and congratulations to the fairly elected or appointed responsible to govern this city. I'm here today January 20th, 2026 to voice my concern with the elected officials about the abilities that the Fort Collins Police Department has and inabilities to the issue of reliable policing of this city. I believe there is a large budget provided by the taxpayers that should offer its residents with safe human forward policing. My immediate personal concern is for traffic safety. I experience regularly unsafe drivers and the policing rules and that which prevent chases, speaking to the many motorcyclists that do not exhibit safety for themselves as well as competent understanding of the new motorcycle law in the state of Colorado of lane filtering, not lane splitting. In my experience, I only see traffic police at speed traps while witnessing five to six traffic violations per trip through town, including speeding, illegal turns with unsafe operation, and complete disregard for public safety without observing common traffic rules and the ability to operate their vehicles while staying with traffic. I spoke with an officer over a year ago who stated the department's inability to police this city efficiently with their current workforce and mentioned their new cameras around town with production dating back to the 80s, in which he may have been joking, although most jokes are based on reality essentially. I was also able to speak with Sergeant Ferrero last Friday, as well as a follow-up from Chief Zvoboda this afternoon. I have no ill words towards the current police force and their senior heads of the department. I would just like to share my observations and opinion with the city Council for a possible change that could be implemented. I was contacted in response to a phone message I left with the City possibly on Friday with very speedy responses offered by the Sergeant-in-Chief. Thank you. Furthermore, I have reported three violations to the non-emergency line in the past week with more violations observed, but I only report the drivers that are unsafe with not current registration and wish they're not contributing to the budget through the statewide registration and air quality concerns we all have to follow for proper operation of their motor

vehicles orchestrated by the state. Thank you. And I apologize I went to the blue lines and skipped Ryan but Jonah come ahead and then we'll do Ryan next. Okay. Hi my name is Jonah and I am

the chair of the DSA Fort Collins Elections Committee, an organizer with the state employees East Union, Colorado Winds, and a union member myself with the Denver News Guild. I'm excited to be going into this new year and to be working with this new council on addressing the crisis of affordability. Our city has been in need of a minimum wage increase for years. People are being priced out of Fort Collins, and while we should do what we can to lower the cost of living here, at the end of the day, we are severely limited in how we can address this issue if workers just aren't bringing home enough money from their jobs. I'd like to emphasize that this is a problem that is pervasive and inclusive of tipped workers. I've worked at two restaurants before. It can be a grueling and thankless job, and the amount of money a tipped worker makes in a night can vary wildly. In a time where so many are living paycheck to paycheck, we cannot let a few low-tipped nights means someone working a full-time job has to skip meals or get evicted. The stability of a livable wage in Fort Collins must be guaranteed for everyone. Relatedly, I'd also like to bring up our city workers. We have seen Denver pass 2U, which created a framework of collective bargaining for workers there, and for over a year we have heard calls for something similar here. I have high hopes that this year our council will respect the dignity of its workforce and open the doors for them to collaborate with city management on how their workplaces can best function. I hope you all have a productive retreat this weekend, and I look forward to hearing what priorities are set for this year. Thank you. Thank you. Ryan?

Hi, my name is Ryan Burns. I'm an AI professional and am currently here to speak about the dangers that I see posed by the flock, safety camera systems.

I work in a healthcare use case for building AI models to predict the future based on healthcare claims. And the value of that is that one may be able to intervene in developing a public health issue,

getting someone a glucose monitor if they might be prone to develop type 1 diabetes, type 2 diabetes based on a family history.

If we see screenings in cancer, being able to follow that up with additional testing. The problem is that when we apply AI to policing,

we are still working with probabilistic mechanisms and machines. We can't operate on what probably is happening when we are dealing with right and wrong and consequences that can be very dire. And so I'm concerned that the police officers that have a very important task in our society and community are being given tools that will only allow them to probably track down criminals and ensure that justice is probably served. As such, I think that we need to be very serious in reconsidering whether flock safety is something that we really need in our communities, especially given the pushback that the company has repeatedly shown in terms of allowing security testing and audits to be done in their systems. It's very common to have companies that approach their coding with more of an open source approach. And Flock Safety has repeatedly shown that that is not something that they are interested in participating in and instead would like to continue to have a veil over how they operate. When we're dealing with machines that are ultimately learning on false positives, false negatives and looking to draw those false positives to a minimum, we have to wonder what are the thresholds that they're setting. And they're not being open in sharing how those thresholds are being set. Thank you. Next, we'll go to Sam online.

Hello, can you hear me? Yeah, go ahead. Thank you. Yeah, my public comment is related to marijuana businesses within the city

and the current location restrictions and zoning. I work for Ace's Place, which is a small woman-owned business. We've been operating for nearly 17 years. We're looking at relocating to a new location, but find it very difficult due to the zoning and distance separation requirements. This is primarily due to the growth that the city has seen in recent years with the focus on residential housing development. And I don't believe the city has updated any of their codes since around 2012.

Almost every jurisdiction in Colorado has updated their marijuana zoning and separation requirements to make it more reflective of it being regulated just like alcohol. Marijuana dispensaries should have the same requirements for where they can place a retail marijuana business just like that with anybody that sells alcohol. We'd like to have the council. Explore options to allow retail marijuana businesses in all commercially zoned areas in the city and potentially remove the residential separation requirements.

Thank you. Next we'll go to Nicholas followed by Blake.

Good evening. I want to first congratulate our new mayor and new council members. Some of you I've met over the past year. Some of you I had the opportunity to meet before that. Some of you have not yet had the opportunity to meet with, but I look forward to working with you.

My name is Nicholas Salwin, and I work for the City of Fort Collins for Connection. Today, I come to you not as a representative of the city, but as an organizer for the City of Fort Collins union effort. For those who are unaware, my tech support team at Connection unionized in August 2024 under the newly enacted POPWA state law. However, our city manager at that time declined to recognize or bargain with our union because, quite simply, there's no law requiring her to do so. There's no framework for recognition. This has led to a wide community-driven campaign to establish a municipal collective bargaining process for city workers. That is, for a clear and fair criteria for when a municipal union may be recognized and qualify for collective bargaining. Until such process is in place, the city as an employer will be unable to claim that it is competitive or that it's espoused values or anything else but empty. I come to you today in good faith and earnestness to ask that you add municipal collective bargaining to your agenda. We cannot lag behind Denver and Boulder on this. Each year that the city refuses to work toward collective bargaining is another year that Fort Collins is born backwards into the labor past. So let me be clear. I'm not asking you to recognize our union. I'm not asking you to bargain with our union. I'm asking you to do what is right and to establish a collective bargaining process for all city workers, most likely by referring the question to Fort Collins voters. It's inevitable that the city of Fort Collins will establish such a process, but you can be the council who takes the initiative. Additionally, I urge you strongly to add a second item to your agenda, namely raising our city's minimum wage for tipped and untipped workers alike. The details need not be hashed out tonight or at your upcoming retreat, but we must at least get the ball rolling on this. Our economy is in a downright scary place right now for so many Americans, and Fort Collins residents are not spared of this hardship. It is time. This council has the opportunity to do something special and just for the people in this city and for the workers who make this city run. Please add these items to your agenda. Thank you.

Thank you. Blake followed by Michael.

Good evening. My name is Blake Simpson. I'm a resident of Council District one and the chair of the Labor Committee for Fort Collins DSA. I'm here tonight because much of this council was elected with a mandate of affordability.

And I believe if we're going to build a more affordable Fort Collins to the most important goals will be guaranteeing all workers a respectable wage, as well as protecting the rights of all workers to organize and enjoy the benefits of unions.

I ask that council adopt two policy priorities for their upcoming term. First, that Fort Collins must raise its minimum wage. Staying at the state minimum is just not sufficient anymore. After years of high inflation, wage growth in our area has not kept up and has created our current situation where, according to MIT,

Our cost of living for a single adult is roughly $1 below Denver's, but our minimum wage lags theirs by $5. This has led to many people struggling to stay in our city. I know I was born here. Most of my childhood friends don't live here anymore, not because they don't want to, but because they can't afford to live and work in their own hometown. Additionally, I ask that council refer a measure to the ballot to create a framework for city employees to unionize and bargain with the city.

The people who make our city run deserve to enjoy the same workers' rights and protections as any worker in the private sector.

However, currently public employees are left out of labor laws at the federal and state levels.

I believe that Fort Collins should rise to the occasion, protect our city workers where state and federal laws have failed them, and create a system for them to organize and have their voices heard with their management.

Thank you for your consideration. I look forward to working with you all to build a more affordable Fort Collins. Thank you, Michael.

Hello. Good evening, City Council. It's great to see the new appointees. Happy New Year. My name is Michael May. I'm a voter in District 5 and I'm here today to advocate for you to include raising the minimum wage on City Council's agenda for 2026. I mostly wish to speak on how this will affect the student population, specifically university students as a student myself, who have a number of affordability concerns in the city, not only from rent, groceries, but also tuition. Considering that the average rent, according to rentcafe.com, for a three-bed is $2,401, which is about $800 a bed per month, students would have to work 57 hours every month at the minimum wage to pay that off with the current minimum wage as it stance. Assuming a part-time job for these students, as you know, you can't spend all of your time not only as a full-time student, also as a full-time, you know, having a full-time career or a job. Typically, part-time is defined as under 130 hours per month. So a student working a part-time job is spending about or more than half of their month's, you know, wage paying for that rent. The student, yeah, on rent alone, not considering groceries, tuition, all the other fees that may come up, you know, transport, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. As prices rise and wages continue to stagnate, it's getting harder and harder for universities to make themselves accessible to working class students. And if CSU's growth first agenda falters, it will be the local economy that suffers. help make Fort Collins more affordable for the upcoming class of 2030. Raise the minimum wage this year, please. All right. Thank you.

Thank you. We'll go online to Shwita. And we would ask if Shwita's online, could you please raise your hand? And if you are a remote participant tonight, any of you, if you could raise your hands, that would be helpful.

Not.

not seeing her right all right if they come back just let me know and we'll come back uh kari

followed by kevin

michael is taller than i am um good evening council and mayor congratulations on your elections and

um i am my name is kori kaiser i live in district two i am here to talk about some of the things

that we've heard a little bit about before.

I looked through some of the information that you all received at your last work session

about the city's workforce and costs related to housing and things.

I think that if things continue to trend the way that they are,

it's going to become increasingly unsustainable for our workforce here.

we need to take action to be able to support the people who work in Fort Collins already we're seeing more people leaving the city to go or more people coming into the city

rather than leaving to go work because they just can't afford to live here when compared to Denver our housing prices past what theirs were last year. Meanwhile, our wages, the AMI is about 10% higher in Denver than it is in Fort Collins, and the minimum wage in Denver is about 30% higher than the minimum wage that we have here. We need to make it more attractive for workers in Fort

Collins and to make it possible for them to live where they work. I think increasing the minimum wage needs to be a priority of this council and also another way to make Fort Collins more

worker friendly would be to allow for a framework for city workers to organize and to be able to

collectively bargain and be recognized and negotiate their working conditions and things related to that. I think there's a lot that we need to do. I know that a lot of this council is very focused on housing and I think that is just one small part of what we need to do to make sure that Fort Collins is able to support our entire community and it looks like I have four

seconds left so that's all thank you thank you uh kevin and then we'll go to julia

kevin's in person sorry julia's in person

hi there council my name is kevin caffrey i'm the president of the northern colorado label labor council we're part of five central labor councils in colorado part of colorado afl cio So I come here tonight to do some of the asking for your retreat that you keep in mind. The fact that a lot of people got elected by talking about affordability. Now we need to put that into action. And that means that we have to look at raising the minimum wage. There was an article in the Denver Post that talked about emergency room doctor was talking to homeless people. and did some research on it based on what their housing costs are for a one-bedroom apartment for a homeless person. They'd have to work 80 hours a week to afford a place to live, and that's all that money would go for. They wouldn't have any money left to pay for food and clothing and anything else. So with that, we need to look at helping our workers for the city, as well as if this could translate into positive for the professors at CSU, where 80% of undergraduate classes are taught by adjunct professors that don't know whether they're going to have a job from semester to semester and are making $30,000 to $40,000 a year. They can't afford to live in this town either. So I think we need to show them and help these connection workers and other city workers have a contract and a livable wage like our police force does and our firefighters do. I have connection. It's a wonderful service and we need to take care of the people that do that. Thank you very much and congratulations to everybody.

Thank you. Julia? Not speaking? Okay. Gabrielle, remotely. Go ahead.

Hi, my name is Gabrielle. I'm in Council District 5, so hello to my new council member. I'm calling in today on the topic of ICE in Colorado. I, as you might know, last week Aurora passed a resolution 11.8.3, federal immigration, oh, nope, my bad, that's their agenda number, R2026-03, a resolution of the City Council of the City of Aurora, Colorado, opposing unlawful and overreaching federal immigration enforcement actions and affirming due process protections. So I'm calling today to ask that the city council considers something similar for Fort Collins. I know that it's more pressing for Aurora because they have the geo facility, but I have been speaking with many of the students I work with, many of my neighbors who are increasingly frightened regardless of their immigration status. ICE has demonstrated in Minneapolis and elsewhere in the country that they are targeting people solely for skin color. there's been reports, corroborated reports of them nabbing Native Americans who obviously live here and going after people with citizenship or with green cards who fit a certain profile. Because of the fear in our community and because I'm worried about my neighbors and my students I'd really appreciate if the City Council does something to affirm that the escalation of violence that ICE brings into communities and the violence ICE enacts on anyone from innocent bystander to not, that City Council will put in something similar to the resolution in Aurora. Thank you.

Thank you. Next we'll go to Hillary, followed by Laura.

Hi, good evening, Council. I'm Hillary, and I work as a labor rights attorney in the Fort Collins area. At the start of your term, I urge you to add two items to your agenda, establishing a framework for municipal collective bargaining and raising Fort Collins minimum wage. This is a moment of real change for Fort Collins. As the political landscape shifts across Colorado, across our country, our city can choose to be a leader on workers' rights, setting a standard for fairness, stability, and democratic participation in the public workforce. In August 2024, The majority of the Sydney's Connection Tech support workers sought to unionize under PROPWA, but were not recognized because Fort Collins lacks a collective bargaining framework, leaving these workers who provide an essential service to our community without a voice. One connection worker I've spoken with described loving her job and deeply believing in public service, but feeling stuck, unable to raise concerns about scheduling or workload, and unsure whether she can afford to keep living here with her kids. Her experience is not unique. It is what happens when workers care about their work but lack a seat at the table. To address this, I'm not asking council to recognize a specific union. Instead, we're asking you to refer a ballot measure to voters to establish a municipal collective bargaining framework in the city charter so the people of Fort Collins can decide what kind of workplaces their tax dollars should support. Additionally, Fort Collins urgently needs a minimum wage increase. We nearly passed one a few years ago, and since then, as many have talked about, the affordability crisis has only intensified. workers especially low wage and tipped workers are being priced out of our city as wages fail to keep pace with rent and basic necessities these issues are bigger than any one workplace municipal collective bargaining and a fair minimum wage are about whether fort collins can maintain a competitive modern economy where workers can build stable lives in the community that they sustain changes are coming to fort collins state employees already unionized denver has a collective bargaining framework and boulder and denver have raised their minimum wage strengthening their communities in doing so since these changes are coming here the question is whether this council will help shape these changes thoughtfully and collaboratively with the people of fort collins thank you for your time and leadership thank you laura and then we'll go to van

Hi, my name is Laura Kohler and I am a resident student and worker in Fort Collins. I am here to ask city council to add a minimum wage increase to their agenda this year. I've been living in Fort Collins for the last several years and the cost of living has impacted me and everyone I know. A couple of people have already brought up statistics around the minimum wage and I have one I'd like to bring up as well. According to the numbers that I got from several different websites, the average rent for a studio apartment in Fort Collins is $1,440 a month. Most apartment complexes will require that you make at least 3 to 3.5 times this amount in order to rent from them, and in order to afford this in Fort Collins, you would need to be making $29

an hour, with the current minimum wage being $15.16. The cost of living is outpacing the way the cost of living is outpacing minimum wage by a significant amount and this is

only one example of it though we are not asking for this high of an increase raising the minimum wage is long overdue right now residents are being priced out of the city academic and personal achievements are often out of reach for those who can't even afford rent and raising the minimum wage would allow thousands of people access to a higher quality of life thank you thank you Van and then we'll go to Adam.

Hi, council. My name is Van Daugherty. I live in District 6. I just wanted to take a moment to congratulate all the new council members that are here tonight, as well as Ann Nelson. I'm really excited about what you're going to bring to District 6. You have an incredible resume, and I'm excited to have you on board with everybody else.

I also wanted to take a minute to echo what we've been hearing tonight in regards to minimum wage.

Fort Collins just has to keep up. As somebody who runs small businesses in town, it is incredibly evident to me and my team

when we have a lack of people coming in because they can't afford to shop with us.

So I would highly encourage you to look into that at the retreat. Thank you. Thank you. Adam, and then we'll go to Amber.

Hi, my name is Adam Hirshhorn from District 2. Welcome to the new members of the council. I wanted to talk to you tonight about the building performance standards because the last council had a tie vote 3-3 and I got that Agatha feeling.

We've talked about free crime tonight. I felt like somebody's going to die or be permanently disabled. So I went to the research. I determined which of these large square footage units were the highest heat hazard. And when I looked at that, it came down to buildings in the 80s that were office or retail space. And that made it very easy to find potential victims of heat stroke. And when it comes down to why this would happen, it just raises the ambient temperature around such that it's a very nice day, anyone would agree, and there's no heat warning. But the ambient temperature in that area creates a microclimate in which people are at risk for permanent damage or death. And so I urge you to pass the building performance standards, and the failure to do so would be an act of omission.

Thank you. Amber?

And then we'll go to Alex.

Hi, everyone. My name is Amber Wright, and I'm a resident in District 1. Thank you for the opportunity to speak today. similar to someone who has come before me I'm here to talk about the possibility for the city of Fort Collins to stand in solidarity with the city of Aurora and

condemning the overreach by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. We can essentially see that these days ICE is acting as the personal military of the Trump regime and is abducting our neighbors disappearing them. 32 people died in ICE custody last year with two of the most visible outside of custody being Keith Porter and Renee Goode. And so we see ICE as a pertinent danger to communities across the United States. In Minneapolis, these days, if you speak to someone who has friends or family there or someone who lives in Minneapolis, they are essentially under occupation, under siege by this military. And so while this is hopefully not coming to Fort Collins, it is very possibly coming to the city of Aurora and to Denver, but it affects all of us, all Coloradans, every single person in this country. And so I urge the council to consider a resolution similar to the city of Aurora condemning this overreach by ICE. But going further, Denver is also considering an ordinance to ban ICE agents from wearing masks, because if they are going to claim to be law enforcement officers, they should not be hiding their identities. They should be accountable to all of their actions, including these gross civil rights violations. So I would recommend considering even further than the Aurora City Council resolution, they will be considering ways to limit cooperation between the Aurora Police Department and ICE at their public safety meeting in February. So we'll be excited to see where that goes. So we should look and follow the example of other cities in Colorado and consider other actions that we can take to keep people safer in our city by standing in solidarity and recognizing that this hurts all of us. While these actions are now more recently affecting a higher number of people, these are actions that have affected indigenous peoples and people of color in the United States since the founding of this nation. So it's important to recognize that and then do our part in protecting our neighbors, especially given the dire conditions in the geo-detention center, which is only an hour and a half drive away from here. When I go to protest there in Aurora City Council, it's in our backyard, and there are people who are suffering from a serious illness. There are people who are being held without warrants. It's a terrible violation of all of our human rights. So please do what you can to prepare our city and ensure that our resources are never being used to aid ICE in all of these terrible actions. So thank you, and I appreciate your time. Thank you. Alex?

Hi there. Congratulations on the elections. My name is Alex Carlson, and I'm here today to talk about the Flock cameras that have been popping up around the city. Flock is, those are the little cameras with the solar panels. They're black and they are kind of spread around. I passed two of them on my way here. Flock would tell the people in this room that it's an automated license plate recognition camera, which is quite common for things like toll roads. But what Flock puts in their marketing material is actually quite different. It's a system that systematically tracks vehicles as they pass camera checkpoints, retains their location history, and characterizes vehicles based off their color, any body damage, political stickers, things like that. And then they take information from other sources. They were actually caught and backed off of this trying to purchase stolen leaked data from data breaches to try to associate cars with the people that are driving them. And all of this gets fed into a large database that is then searchable to different law enforcement agencies. And to be clear, this is not any concern about Fort Collins law enforcement. When Larimer County Sheriff was talking earlier today at a county meeting he mentioned that Larimer County shares this information with over 600 agencies and we don't have great visibility into who they are and we don't have great visibility into whether or not they reflect our values as a community on top of this i just want to note that flock is not a public safety company they are a data broker and they're funded by private equity companies and their incentive model for how they make money is very different from the incentive models that our police department has and what we have as a community. And so while Flock advertises that municipalities retain the data that's on those cameras, in fact, they also are required in most contracts to grant Flock a perpetual license to use that content. There's other things that are worth looking into around the default security that these cameras have and how they're set up. There's been security researchers that have found that the footage stays longer than the retention policy that Flock mandates. But at the end of the day, I think that they're just profoundly un-American. I think people behave differently when we don't have privacy and we censor our speech and our thoughts and who we associate with. And so what scares me is that there was no public comment on this. They just sort of appeared.

So what I'd like to ask city council is to review these policies, look to make this information more transparent so that the community can weigh in and decide for ourselves if we feel that this security tradeoff is worth the privacy infringement.

because we should prosecute crimes when they happen, not before they happen.

Thank you. And Alex, can you just give your general address? Oh, yeah. Sorry, Old Town, Fort Collins. Perfect. Thank you. Then we'll go to Beth online. Go ahead, Beth.

Hi, hopefully you can hear me okay. Yes, go ahead. I wanted to thank you, Mayor and Council members, and congrats to especially our new Council members. My name is Beth and I'm a working mom and I live in Fort Collins in District 2.

I am speaking tonight about raising Fort Collins minimum wage.

I was one of the many workers who asked the Fort Collins City Council to raise the minimum wage in 2021.

back then we talked to you all or some of you about how the median rent for a two-bedroom apartment back then was 1,360 and of others as others have mentioned that is a lot less than it

is today really and it's also time to talk about the city workers who are unionizing so for your priorities this year i'm asking for the council to prioritize um two things i'm asking council to refer about measure to voters for a framework for municipal collective bargaining Good evening.

And also to raise the minimum wage.

Thank you for your time. Thank you. Next we'll go to Jonesy online as well.

We're not seeing Jonesy.

Jonesy did email. If you are listening, you can send an email to cityleaders at fortcollins.gov and we will reach out. Oh, okay.

We have a phone number that raised their hand. We're going to give it a try.

Let's find out who it is.

Can you unmute yourself? Go ahead.

Yeah. Hi. This is Genzy Wenschel.

I'm a resident in 80528 area, and I'm just calling to also support the city council passing a resolution similar to what Aurora did to protect residents from ICE.

and I also just want to support what Amber said about going further than that.

Yeah, that's kind of the main thing is just echoing what everyone else has said about that resolution. Thank you. Thank you.

Next we'll go to Shirley Piel.

Good evening. I'm Shirley Piel, 80526, and I currently serve on the planning and zoning, but I'm not here in that capacity tonight. First, I want to say congratulations to each of our newly elected council members and our Mayor Francis. You've earned the trust of this community,

and I appreciate your willingness to serve. As you prepare for your upcoming retreat and begin setting priorities for the next two years, I want to share a short list of issues that I consistently heard on the campaign trail. First, the undergrounding of electorate lines in District 4. This was promised more than 13 years ago. Today, residents still live with an ongoing fire hazard and a visual eyesore. Second, the management of our natural areas. These spaces are one of our community's greatest assets, but management practices, particularly grazing, raise real concerns. Third, I strongly encourage you to make economic health a central priority. That means evaluating the effectiveness of the Economic Health Office and the city's economic strategic plan and ensuring the budget truly supports their success. A strong local economy underpins everything you're... We'll hope to accomplish. I also want to congratulate staff on the new city website. It's a great step forward. But residents are asking you not to stop there. Outdated technology and inefficient processes across departments continue to frustrate people. Please give staff the tools they need to succeed and consider an evaluation that identifies silos and breakdowns and communications. As you move forward, I ask that you adopt a more holistic approach when considering resolutions and ordinances especially those that increase costs for residents our community cannot sustain what many describe as death by a thousand small cuts residents also want you to be more visible and accessible put your names and faces on communications let people know who represent them and that you're listening and that you're working on their behalf finally I'll note two practical but important issues cell service which is not just a convenience but a safety concern and the need to clean up the neglected green utility boxes across the city. Thank you for your service, for listening, and for your commitment to leading our city forward. And as always, I'm available to have coffee or a glass of wine to discuss this. Thanks.

Thank you. Tyler? And then we'll go to Greg. Good evening. I understand that you're new and newly reelected. Congratulations. You have a tough job representing us, and I appreciate that from an observer's standpoint.

My name is Tyler Davidson, and I live in Southwest Fort Collins, 80526.

I believe that your first and highest calling is to uphold the Constitution, and that's what I'm here to talk about in relation to flock cameras. You see, flat cameras are a direct violation, in my opinion, of the right to privacy in our persons and papers.

You've already heard the details from some of the other citizens making comments here tonight about what they do with the information that they gather. And they hold on to it. They say they don't hold on to it indefinitely. I don't believe them. We've seen many abuses of this already. There was an incident right here in Colorado in Greenwood Village where a woman was charged merely on flock evidence, which turned out to be spurious.

And Fort Collins residents were not asked about installing flock cameras. We weren't consulted. There was no discussion. They just sort of started appearing. and frankly I would have voted against it and I will vote against any chance I get because I don't need a private company following me around through Fort Collins, Larimer County or wherever else and then keeping my data and then hanging on to that and selling it literally to the highest bidder. We've also heard people concerned about the descent into and I'm going to say it fascism and authoritarianism in this country right now. We see it in the headlines. The government as we watch are absolutely ignoring and flouting their constitutional responsibility to uphold citizens' rights. That's in the oath of office. And therefore, I'm extremely concerned about the direction this is taking and how this information can be misused. And I will leave you with a famous quote from one Benjamin Franklin, those who would give up some of their liberty in return for security or safety will neither have nor will they deserve either one. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Greg? Good evening, Council. My name is Greg. I am a resident of District 1, and I chair the membership committee for DSA Fort Collins. I want to echo the congratulations that you all have heard to our newest council members and mayor, and old ones too. If there is one word to describe this council's mandate, it is affordability. Whether you are campaigning in the 1st, 3rd, 5th district, or citywide, each of you that ran last year rightfully invoked a cost-of-living crisis that is making it increasingly difficult for working people to afford to live in Fort Collins. As someone who knocked on nearly 600 doors across the city last year, I can confidently say that those of you that ran this past year won your hard-fought competitive campaigns because your constituents trusted you as champions of an agenda to make Fort Collins more affordable. So I have high hopes that this council will make progress in addressing the economic crisis that is pushing out the very people that built our city. But with high hopes also comes high expectations. for as we've seen from our own Cheeto-in-Chief, it's one thing to run on an agenda of affordability and it's another thing to deliver on that agenda. And I want to kind of on that echo a quote from someone who brought affordability more to the mainstream, our fellow DSA member Zoran Mamdani. Quote, There's a lot of politics where it feels like it's a contest around narrative and when you win something, it's just for the story that you can tell of what you won. but so many working people can't feel that victory in their lives. When we talk about the struggles of our democracy, when we talk about a withering faith in it as a political system, we have to understand that the withering of that faith is intensely connected to the inability of that system to deliver on the needs of the people in it. End quote. The point of a higher minimum wage is you feel it every paycheck. The point of a framework for union recognition is you feel it in the support of your coworkers and the improved efficiency of city services. The point of affordable housing is that it's an attainable reality for working families, not just an aspirational goal. So this year, I'm looking for not intellectual or narrative victories. I'm looking for material ones that will benefit working families in Fort Collins, and I look forward to working with each of you to deliver those victories. Thank you.

Great. Thank you. That is everyone we have signed up for public comment tonight, so thank you, everyone, for coming out.

I will now turn over to council for any public comment follow-ups Councilmember pot yandy

Thank You mayor and thanks to everybody who came out as always Really great comments tonight. You all did an excellent job and really appreciate the feedback Going into our retreat about where values lie and where you would like to see some priorities brought by council

It's always helpful to hear from residents

regarding our flock technology and i know not all of the flock technology in the city is city owned but my understanding is we do have a work session on february 24th is that correct city manager

that is correct and we are making note of the various questions that are coming up during public comment and we have a staff report item scheduled on february 24th where both council and the community will have a chance to learn more perfect and so i i encourage folks where

that's an issue that's a particular interest to tune in or observe here at City Hall.

There won't be an opportunity for public comment that evening, but you can listen to the entire discussion in the presentation. So we'd love to have you there. MS. Thank you. Any other follow-up?

All right.

Seeing none, do any council members wish to pull any items from the consent calendar? Seeing none, do we have a motion?

yes we do in a moment

oh my goodness I'm on the wrong page okay it's going to be on page 8 thank you sorry you guys this is new for me all right thank you mayor I move to adopt the consent calendar items 1 through 10

I have a motion my council member pot yandi is there a second No second great second by councilmember Nelson any further discussion

Yeah, councilmember fudge. I would just like to note that on number eight. I believe it is the grant for the Irish school crossing project There is a provision there to enter into an IGA to accept grant funds from Larimer County and I am an employee of Larimer County and so I considered this and asked for advice about whether this would be a possible conflict but the advice I've gotten and my personal thought on it is that it's not a conflict I mean because I don't have any authority over the county's expenditure in this matter I just learned about this reading the packet so I don't even know which department is giving the grants this project although I can imagine so those are my thoughts on this and I just wanted to explain well why I will be voting on this and not pulling number eight so anybody has Any thoughts on that? I'd be glad to hear them. Otherwise, we can move on great. Thank you

All right, seeing anything else. Okay. Will the clerk please call the roll

Francis yes coven Yes, patty ony yes fudge yes conway yes nelson yes

Great that passes six zero do council members have any comments on the consent calendar Seeing none. All right. There are no staff reports tonight. So we'll go to council member reports any council member reports

Council member

Thank you mayor, I just wanted to shout out all of the organizations and individuals who are involved with our Martin Luther King jr Event at CSU this past weekend. It was a really lovely event a really

mobilizing opportunity to kind of refocus on our our charge toward justice and equity in this community and to follow in Dr. King's footsteps. So thanks to folks who made that a really special and thoughtful event.

Great, any others? Council Member Hovind and then we'll go to Council Member Fudge. Sorry.

I just want to report that I attended the neighborhood meeting for the Prospect Lane Half stoplight and just because I'm new to the whole thing. I just really appreciated the in-depth conversation

Everybody really brought some great ideas and feedback and look forward to moving forward on the project. Thank you

Thank you. I also attended the Martin Luther King event yesterday with councilmember Patnion D and mayor Francis And it was especially poignant to me because I grew up in the Twin Cities Minneapolis St. Paul area And so listening to the speakers there and realizing that in my hometown, we're still at a place where they are dragging people off the street based on their looks or they're throwing people into jail for standing up for those folks was really eye-opening. I do want to say, so obviously there's a lot of work to be done. Also, it does make me a little bit grateful that the folks in the Twin Cities are standing up for one another and fighting back and supporting their neighbors. And it made me hopeful that should something similar like that happen here in Fort Collins that we would do the same so thank you

Thank you anyone else Great seeing none. We will move on to our first and only discussion item Making supplemental appropriations of revenue from the quarter cent capital tax and authorizing transfers is there a presentation for this item?

We do have a brief presentation this evening Jeannie Sawyer, who is our Senior Policy and Project Manager, will speak to this item. And she is joined by Joe Wimmer, who is our Finance Manager in Utilities. That title might not be 100% right, but it's close.

All right. Good evening, Mayor and Councilmembers. Kelly teed that up really well. And this is a short presentation, so I'm going to jump into it. Some of you up there were instrumental in shaping this package and helping to develop it, and some of you have inherited this package. I just want to give some background that this is a key funding mechanism within the city, a renewable dedicated tax that we have been utilizing for decades now. And so it's super exciting that the voters once again supported this measure. You may hear it occasionally referred to as the Community Capital Improvement Program, CCIP. We're trying to shift away a little bit to quarter cent capital tax, a little shorter in there. But you'll see here on the slide, this does produce about $11 million annually. and we are you have the project list in front of you that covers those dollars. We are here tonight to do just an initial appropriation for the funds that really operate on a standard basis, particularly in our transportation area. These are the programs. We want to try to give them some predictable funding throughout. The next thing we'll be looking at are really some quick wins, right? We had voter support, so we want to show some action coming out of the gate. We also know that we want to meet community and council priorities in bringing items forward. We'd like to have some idea, you know, years out so that we are moving in the right direction, and then also utilize our two-year budgeting process for real specifics. So we have some idea and direction, we have some predictability, and then we'll have actual discussion and transparency within the budget process of what those projects will actually look like coming forward. And so I think with that, Joe's going to talk about the specifics.

Thanks, Jenny. So here's tonight's recommended appropriation from the first year of the sales tax. These are the projects we know are ready to go at this moment. As Jenny talked about, a lot of these are ongoing capital programs established in previous iterations of the 10-year sales tax. The other program on the list is the Affordable Housing Capital Fund, the $2.5 million. With that comes specific needs and requests that I'll highlight on the next slide. And then our standalone project tonight is the community bike park, appropriation of $30,000 to get started on preliminary site planning for the Hughes site and delivering on that multi-use voter approved plan.

So for the affordable housing capital fund, I do want to call out this appropriation is from From the new 10 years of the sales tax, there is a balance on the previous 10 years of the sales tax that sunset in 2025. That balance from the previous 10 years is $600,000. $400,000 of that is budgeted for fee relief in our fee waiver program. And then $200,000 is available for equity or direct subsidy requests like we have tonight. In addition to that $600,000 balance, there is a balance on the previous 10 years of the sales tax in its entirety. and the previous city council passed a resolution late last year to direct that fund balance to go towards affordable housing. We're still finishing up accounting and year-end sales tax collection processes to refine that $5 million estimate of that balance and then waiting for all projects on that previous 10-year list to get going under construction before we bring forward that $5 million. So with the $2.5 million, there are two requests for that. One request from Housing Catalyst for $1.2 million for the Village on Eastbrook, 73 units, and

then a request from care communities for a rehab of the Windtrail Park apartments for $950,000 and 50 affordable units.

And then just to clarify, the $2.5 million tonight is an appropriation from this next 10 years of the tax. It is not approving those two funding agreements. Those are going to come forward at the next council meeting at February 3rd via resolution for council to authorize and execute those funding agreements. With that, we can answer any questions about the funding source of the sales tax. And we also have staff here tonight from these specific departments receiving these funds that can go into any specific fund questions and project questions.

MS. Great. Thank you. I don't have anyone signed up to speak on this item, so I will go to Council. Is there any comments or questions? Council Member Faiandi?

MS. Thank you both for the presentation. Regarding the funding for the planning of the bike park, can you speak about how that $30,000, kind of what falls under the scope with that $30,000 because clearly the bike park is one small portion of a larger plan for the Hughes property.

We are just starting to pull together our project teams on this. And with the multi-use in there, other funding will be utilized from natural areas and park planning. And so we thought we'd pull a small portion from the bike park too as we start looking at site feasibility across the entire property to determine. So it's just a piece of that. And the first step will be some site planning there to identify habitat, good features, bad features, and just really starting that initial work.

Okay. Thank you. Other questions? Council Member Fudge.

I just have a broad question, I guess, as a newbie elected. for the sales tax and the projects that are listed with the budgets. I know that they were called out as projects in the ballot language, but I'm curious the funding amounts for those. I assume that they change as project costs change or the council priorities. What's the process for deciding those changes?

So we decided to account for inflation for those projects. So we set a funding amount on the ballot list in 2024 dollars. And then for like these transportation programs that we're going to spread out over the 10 years, accounting for inflation so it's not losing budget over those 10 years, largely going off engineering indexes, like a 3 to 5 percent construction inflation on that. So at the end of the 10 years, they're receiving the same ongoing amount of funds to not lose value.

Does that answer it?

Well, I guess I'm more curious if there's a project listed and I'm just asking process honestly that the council ultimately decides maybe we need the funds for other things. Is that allowable or it's pretty much set as a result of the ballot?

It's set as a result of the ballot.

But once, if I can just add, Council Member Fudge, once the ballot initiatives have been delivered, then that funding that may be excess funding that was collected is at Council's discretion to appropriate where they would like, first to projects in the ballot if we need additional funding there to complete those projects, and then to other uses. And so that speaks a little bit to, I think, the previous Council really wanting to signal that the priority for those excess dollars in the current package would go toward housing.

There's one other quick thing I might add, and that is there's specific language in the ballot measure about evaluating the feasibility, and there is room for council to determine that a project is no longer financially feasible or feasible for other reasons. So there's a little bit of room in there to continue looking at what will work.

That's helpful. Thank you.

Other questions? I had a few questions. Are the sidewalks, the pedestrian sidewalk program, are those sidewalks already identified about what we're going to do in 2026?

I saw Brad Buckman back there. Is he still there?

And then my follow-up question for Brad, whether you have it tonight or in a follow-up memo, are any of those sidewalks on that list outside of our prioritization?

Good evening, Mayor. Council. Oh, thanks. No, they are not outside of our prioritization. In other words, the prioritization model that we use, yeah, they're all within the prioritization model. But to give you an example, you know, just for the benefit of council, the way we look at the sidewalk prioritization is the higher priority are given to, you know, missing gaps in the network, especially along arterial roadways, near schools, and in areas of the city where there's a health equity index need. And so the projects that we have ready for 2026, for example, are along East Stewart on the north side from College to Spring Creek Trail. Right now, there's inadequate sidewalk in that area. JFK Parkway east side between Horsetooth and Boardwalk. and then Taft Hill on the east side between Elizabeth and Clearview, where you have basically the undersized sidewalk.

Undersized is an understatement, but yes. Yeah, exactly. Okay, great. Thank you. Did you have anything else to add? Did I cut you off?

No.

Okay, great. Thank you for answering that. You're welcome. And then I just had a question about the housing. You may have said this, Joe, but was that a competitive process for those funds for Care and Housing Catalyst?

I think we have Vanessa who will help us out here. I can tell Joe's going to phone a friend. So Vanessa Finley is our housing manager.

Good evening. Yes, Vanessa Finley, senior housing manager in the Housing and Community Vitality Department. We've accepted applications for these quarter cent sales tax projects on a rolling basis. And so they're evaluated by staff and then brought forward to council. So not a competitive process in the same way as our competitive funds. Instead, really trying to respond to projects needs as they arise.

I guess a different way to ask is, was everyone aware that could apply for these funds?

That's been something that we have, as we've been talking with developers in the community, especially really coming up with a strategy for process and looking at the uses for this next decade of funds. We have heard that folks want more transparency and we've been getting out and letting folks know really how they

can submit a request. Okay great and then just another question maybe for you while you're up here is in the materials that said about the affordable housing funding plan being developed with the new tax do we have an idea of one when that's going to be complete by and then two is it going to come to council or

finance committee we do have a work session scheduled on March 10th and so some of that discussion maybe we can solidify at that March work session

unless you have further details now okay and if not maybe a follow-up memo just some anticipated timeline for that and then when it would come to council okay great thank you that was all my questions any other questions yeah

councilmember Conway yeah the question about the arterial intersection improvement and streetscapes program I was just hoping to get a better sense of

how that prioritization works and I guess a similar question to the to mayor Francis you know how we make a prioritization list and whether this allocation is outside of that or inside of that list.

We'll introduce Dana.

Good evening, Mayor and Council Members. Dana Horncull with the Engineering Department and head the Capital Projects Group. We have a Transportation Capital Improvement Program Priority List that governs sort of

the list of projects and the prioritization of those that we are tackling with CCIP dollars

as well as other grant funding sources and capital expansion fees.

For the appropriation for this evening that's on the agenda,

essentially there is a local funding match in there for some grant funding that was awarded for Safe Streets and Roads for All grant, as well as some furtherance of designs for intersections at Timberline and Carpenter, as well as College and Drake. And so those are the three primary categories where that funding is slated to go.

Yeah, and can you just give me a sense of some of the things? So that was partially to do matching grant funding, but can you give me a sense of some of the criteria that we factor into choosing these upgrades to streets?

Sure, that transportation capital improvement methodology that we use, the focus, the primary focus is safety.

And so that's the number one criteria.

Other criteria are the furtherance of other city plans, as well as looking at how the health equity index scores for projects in different portions of the city, as well as closing the gap.

Other projects, the synergy with utilities projects in those corridors can increase the score.

we came to council last year with a sort of a detailed explanation of that TCI dashboard and would be happy to present that again if it's helpful.

I don't know that we need a full presentation, but you could send it to me.

I appreciate it. Will do. Great. Any other questions? Okay, CNN, do we have a motion for this item?

We do. I move to adopt on first reading ordinance number zero zero nine twenty twenty six making supplemental Appropriations of revenue from the quarter cent capital tax and authorizing transfers of appropriations

Sir a second a second great. We have a motion by councilmember pot yandee and a second by councilmember fudge any further discussion I'll just say thank you I'm excited that we're able to get things going so fast and with some key projects that residents have been asking for so So thank you for bringing forward an easy package to pass. Any other? All right. Weather clerk, please call the roll.

Hoven? Yes. Paddyandi? Yes. Fudge? Yes. Conway? Yes. Nelson? Yes. Francis?

Yes. Okay. That passes 6-0. Is there any other business coming before council? Okay. Seeing none we will adjourn this meeting at 7 11 p.m. We will take about a 15-minute break And then we will relocate to the CIC room to start our work session. Thank you everyone

27 p.m. And I call the work session to order well the city manager, please provide a review of tonight's work session agenda

Yes, thank you mayor good evening for our work session this evening. We have really one item and it's preparing some groundwork for our upcoming council retreat we'll break this into two parts the first will be a focus on some overall trends and forces and then a deeper dive into our city financials and again an overview of some of our financial services great so I'm actually

going to start us off. It's a little unusual that I'm the one doing the presentation, but tonight, again, this is really intended to help equip council for the benefit of the public to

know. City council has an important part of their role is priority setting for the upcoming two years. So we have retreats coming on this coming Saturday, the 24th, and then a second part of that That will be on the 31st. That's also when city council will be selecting the boards and commissions that they will be liaison to, liaisons for, and also ad hoc committees, things like that. Initiating their preferences for those, that formal action will occur then at the February 3rd meeting. So, again, tonight is really to do some just information sharing with you all. And our questions are quite straightforward.

What questions and feedback do you have about this information?

We have several staff members here who are prepared to help answer those questions.

And then given that this is high-level, thought-provoking information, we do anticipate there may be topics that you wish to do a deeper dive and explore further in future work sessions.

So I want to start with just a high-level look at our community survey results. This is something that we do every two years to have a statistically valid take of how the community is feeling. About city services and about the community at large. So a couple very high level takeaways from this. First, I think some good news in that our residents really do feel good about their overall quality of life here in Fort Collins. So in our most recent survey last year, we saw, again, an uptick in that number to be at 87%. So, again, overall, the community really does feel good about their quality of life.

We asked the community a variety of questions, but we always asked them if they were to emphasize by budget priorities where they would like to see same, less, or more investment.

This is where they would like to see more investment. And I show this not to go into the deep dive, but just to suggest that it reinforces much of what we have been hearing and what you all have heard already even tonight in terms of some of the priority around neighborhood livability and social health. Certainly, transportation is something. The gray bar, just to orient you, that gray bar on the bottom is where the community is saying they would prioritize. I think it's also just worth noting that there's not a lot of variation, right? Our community, more than half of them are wanting to prioritize economy, environment, transportation, neighborhood livability, and social health. And then to a lesser extent, culture, parks, and recreation, although we saw a pretty good uptick there from the prior year. safety and I'll just always note that we even have some residents who want to add more to general government which we don't think happens everywhere so I think that speaks to the trust people have in their community and then priorities these are based on comments people are able to do open-ended comments again no surprises here just reinforcing again that housing costs and affordability is

something that we routinely hear from in statistically valid surveys in addition to the more general engagement that you all do and that we do at the city. All right, so again, with housing

affordability being one of the things that we hear the most, I wanted to share a few of the growth and development trends that we're seeing. So at a just high-level snapshot area, Fort Collins is actually experiencing pretty low population growth. I think there may be a perception that Fort Collins is growing and growing. We last year were at just a 0.6% population growth. That is about a thousand people per year. So again, we still have people coming in. For comparison, I think it helps level

set. Loveland was at a 6.2% growth in that same time period. The other high-level trend we're

seeing is that our population is aging in Fort Collins. Again, on average, our population is younger than Colorado, largely due to the presence of Colorado State University. But when you look at, and we'll see this later, that 65 plus age bracket is one of the fastest

growing segments that we have here in the city of Fort Collins at 14.4%.

The other thing we have is a lower average household size. So just over two people. and we also are seeing not as many school-aged children you'll see that in future charts and then I just want to note again remote work is something that

is very prevalent in the workforce in our community so about 21% of our employees are not city employees the community workforce is working from home

So some data that we're receiving from, again, other entities, the 2025 Common Sense Institute report showed that, again, net migration into Fort Collins is actually down 26% from

pre-pandemic levels. So, again, when we talk about slowing growth, by comparison, Greeley, again, according to

this organization, this will be the year that Greeley actually surpasses Fort Collins in population. So why are these things important to us? Well, as we think about regional travel patterns, as we think about workforce, as we think about schools, these are all things that are having a big impact on our community. Again, I'm going to go into just a little bit more information on what we're seeing with housing prices, both rent and purchase homes. And then, as I mentioned, some demographic trends. You know, again, some of this is happening not only in Fort Collins, I think it's very important to note. So things like birth rates declining are happening certainly throughout the state. That's something we're seeing. But we know, again, that this is having a longer term impact on things like labor force availability, school enrollment and housing demands. So if you look at this chart, and I have to put my glasses

on so that I can make sure I get the colors right, but the light blue line at the top is population

growth in northern Colorado. So light blue at the top, again, northern Colorado is experiencing considerable population growth. But that darker blue line, the second one, is Fort Collins.

and again if you look then at the next one it's Greeley and underneath that is Colorado as a whole so you just see again where that curve is going to cross over that really is soon going to surpass Fort Collins this I mentioned earlier in terms of households with children so if you look at the weld

County the gray bar on the left is Weld County the number of households with

children is about just over 37 percent if you look at Larimer County considerably lower at 25 percent and then Fort Collins in these regional comparisons is the lowest with only 23 percent of our households currently being households that have include children all right this is another one again, we know there are certainly a lot of concern about affordability. So what is the data showing us? The bottom orange line is what's happening with median income. So I will say a slight and gradual increase, but it is increasing, particularly since 2021, that number is going up. When you look at the median price of a townhome, that's the blue line. For the first time, we're starting to see rent, which is the green line, is actually surpassing the price of single family homes. And so it is an interesting trend that we're starting to see. Again, median income is on a slight uptick. The home prices are starting to come down a little bit, but rent is still rising.

Okay. So I think one of the questions that comes up is, well, is there still building happening in Fort Collins, right? And we hear questions about that. And I do want to let people know that there is still a lot of activity that is happening. So, again, we are seeing an upward trend in the number of building permits.

And if you look at the past 20 years, which this is just a slight snapshot of that, but we issued the fourth highest number of building permits last year.

So, in 2025, we had the fourth most permits for new housing as what we've had in the last 20 years.

So there is certainly amount of activity here. And again, we have folks from our planning and development team who are able to speak to that if people have questions.

This gets again at a chart that just shows a little bit more the mix of the type of building permits that we're seeing. So again, what I would say at a high level takeaway here, I think that mixed use and multi-unit. So it really is the multi-unit where we're seeing much more activity. Those single unit, certainly single unit attached is down a little bit. But again, we're seeing a lot of activity and it is in multi-unit properties. Yeah. Councilmember Fudge.

Can I ask a question? Yes. So I was interested as I read slide 55, the slide prior to this, it looked like the number of applications, development applications was stagnant, if not declining, at least for pre-submittal reviews. And then the next slide showed the big increase in 2025, the most ever. So I'm curious how that works or what may have happened.

Yeah. So Clay Fricke is our planning manager, and he can help explain that a little bit.

Hi, Council. Nice to see you all. Clay Fricke, planning manager. So essentially the takeaway here is that while applications might be flat, pre-smidal reviews are down, generally speaking, it speaks to then that these applications then contain more units. They're bigger projects, generally speaking. and what I would say too is we're seeing more projects on the small side and more projects on the big side and a lot less in the middle and so I think that's kind of the high level takeaway from from this slide in conjunction with the next one. Thank you. Could you quantify sorry can I jump in

um like what's on the high side what's on the small side and what like if you're talking about

number of units? Yeah, in terms of number of units, I think we're not seeing too many kind of standalone projects, or if we are, they're like accessory dwelling units, but we're not seeing many things of like 8 to 12 units, that sort of thing. And then when we see a larger project, it's usually going to be something that contains over 100 units at least on the multi-unit side of things. And so there's also two big master plan communities that also are in the works. So So things like Bloom, Montava as well, that also contain substantial portions of land, but also to a lot of units within them as well.

Thank you. I just had a question. Obviously, when we're talking about Greeley, it looks like the narrative is that Greeley is poised to become the largest community in northern Colorado over time. Is that accurate?

I mean, I think that I read that within their GMA, they're projected to be over 500,000 people eventually.

Is that accurate? That is correct. Okay.

And part of that, and this is just for my edification, when we're comparing to Greeley, they have a much larger geographic GMA. Is that accurate? That's not built out compared to Fort Collins? Or is that not accurate?

I can't give you the actual size. We can get that for follow-up.

it does make sense to me that that would be true when I think about how far

their current undeveloped boundary extends. Okay. And then I don't know if you can answer this question. I'm just trying to, you know, as we work on affordability, kind of make sure that I keep my goals in scope with reality. Do we know if there are trends with housing prices based on geography because just I think intuitively it's and and looking at how the front range has developed it seems like the closer you get to the foothills properties seem to be more expensive or communities are is that something that we should keep in mind because or is it does that I guess does that trend hold up typically it just seems like you know boulders progressively more expensive than the communities as you move further east for Collins or is that just

anecdotal. I think we'd have to look into that a little bit more. That strikes me as a little bit more anecdotal. And I think part of it, too, is I think more of it is a reflection of just the maturity of these different communities, if anything else. Like when I think of Boulder, I mean, they had a lot of growth during the 60s and 70s and enacted policy to kind of ratchet growth down. And that's kind of why they're on the trajectory they are. Fort Collins, I think, was similar, but we had a lot more space to grow into. So now home prices going up as we run out of easy land to develop and then I think some of the communities on the east side of I-25, Eastern Plains, etc. are kind of in a similar sort of path where they're starting to build out into those areas that are within their boundaries and as they push up to the limits of those boundaries it's going to be more difficult putting upward pressure on home prices and so I think it's more a reflection of age and just their trajectory of growth rather than perhaps proximity to the foothills.

That makes sense. I mean no shade on Greeley. I think just I I assume this is the best community ever and that it probably would always be more expensive. But I just want to make sure that I'm looking at comparable communities with regard to other factors,

because it sounds like really in a lot of ways is not a comparable community or it won't be with the size of their GMA and the amount that they're going to be able to build out moving forward. And like you said, the age of communities. So I that's all I want to know.

I just wanted to feel it out a little bit.

Yeah, and I think again, I'll just say tonight we're at pretty high level and what's helpful are to hear the kind of questions and curiosities you have because I think much of this we can then do some follow-up and come back with some additional comparisons if that's helpful for council.

If it's helpful also, I'll just note, and Caleb White's, I'm the city's chief financial officer, it really is an important comparator in terms of them being in the northern Colorado region and then certainly as we look at development patterns in northern Colorado and when I get into deeper into my presentation some data about economic activity and how that economic activity drives revenue for cities that's a very important consideration as we think about Fort Collins's position in northern Colorado. Thank you.

Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't it the You You You You

And so, it's really metropolitan statistical area that's going to cross this year, not the city itself.

That is correct. That's a very good clarification.

So, it's Weld County itself rather than Larimer County in general.

Okay. So, just a few other things before we – oh, I'm sorry. You just said – oh.

Well, if you'll allow me. One other question.

Thanks. Okay. Thank you for my initiation to what a work session can be.

Do you have a sense of the type of units or like if it's market rate or primarily affordable or what are we building the most of, I guess, college student housing?

And generally speaking, on the multi-unit side, there are studios ones, twos, ones and twos. That's the majority of the units that are being constructed by developers right now in Fort Collins. Generally, the market rate, there's some student-oriented housing in there. There's some senior-oriented housing. So it's a pretty wide mix of target demographics and then locations in the community. And then I would say on the in terms of affordable housing I was looking at our development pipeline earlier today And I think about six percent of the units that are in our pipeline are proposed to be deed restricted and affordable So I think that's kind of the composition generally speaking of development patterns and what developers are building right now

I'll jump on the bandwagon I'm curious and maybe just in a follow-up, you know, I believe at one time we had a idea of where we needed units Whether it's studio one two three and single do we still have that and then do we have an update of where we are? And what's being built?

I'd have to double check and see if we have any specific policy direction on the types of units in terms of bedroom count and things like that I have to look at closer to the housing strategic plan to refresh my memory

Policy but it was kind of like this is where our gaps are And I think just having an update on that if we can would be helpful or maybe I made it up But I do feel like we at one point had this is where we're really missing Based on city plan and the affordable housing plan

And I remember root policy did like a gaps analysis a few years ago And I think that's maybe what you're referencing mayor Francis and so yeah, we can take a closer look and Thank you

I was just gonna ask you know I have a guess as to where if there's a geographical concentration to where these units are going in, but if you had a more accurate sense of where this stuff is getting built in terms of the multifamily especially.

Yeah, for the bigger multi-unit projects, those are generally speaking in the core of our community, so pretty close to the College Avenue corridor where there's zoning that allows it

and where there's also to the infrastructure to support that.

Broadly speaking, most of the development activities in northeast Fort Collins

just because that is where we have greenfield sites that have infrastructure close by.

And so that's where you're seeing some of those larger master plan communities proposed. And so that's where we're seeing most of the development activity.

And then, of course, there's smatterings of development everywhere else. But I think that's, generally speaking, where we're seeing most activity.

All right. Clay, move quickly.

All right. So again, a related area, I want to do just some high level look at labor market profile and what we're seeing there. So Fort Collins, again, certainly we're seeing changes in the region. And I would say at least you'll see up here at least one in every three jobs, the Northern Colorado region can be traced to Fort Collins.

So we do continue to be a major employment hub. And at the same time, important to note that really economic growth is certainly happening in the region up around us. We are still a net importer of labor, though. So about 50,000 people daily are commuting in from nearby communities to work in Fort Collins. So that's a when you think about our regional road network, we know that most of those commuters are coming in in single occupancy vehicles. And so, again, the demand on our regional network is pretty, pretty significant. This particular slide is about some of the commuting patterns and the trends that we're seeing here. And what I would say is, again, when you look at that amount of movement, so just about 50,000 people coming into the community, that is not quite, this is where I get really rough math, right? It's not quite twice the amount of people who both live and work here, but it is certainly significantly higher. And so when we think about our roads, when we think about air quality and the environment, and also just that economic cycle of money that is earned here being spent here, those are all impacts that we have to think about.

Again, this just goes into a little bit more of some of the flow of workers for the type of jobs.

So I know this is rather small font on here, but I think, again, you see Fort Collins as an education hub, certainly manufacturing, food services.

These are all areas where people are coming into the city of Fort Collins for their employment.

all right um so and when we think about the travel survey again as i mentioned most people are driving alone and certainly we work on things like our ride share and other things encouraging people to carpool and do different things having some great regional trail connections so we're doing things to support that commuting in other ways and just important to note that half of employees are going more than five miles and most of them are driving alone as they do that okay so again this is a lot of high-level information I want to just maybe highlight again a little bit the why we think this is important to share and the things that we want that we are thinking about and certainly expect council to be thinking about as well of why it why this matters so the first thing and i made a few notes and now i can't find them this is why i don't present people this is why i have um okay so the why we think it matters um the first one you're going to hear a lot about as caleb starts talking about the financial trends because, again, for a long time, Fort Collins had about 70 percent of the regional sales and use tax was happening in Fort Collins, which far surpassed the percentage that we were of the population. That is changing, and so that is impacting certainly the service levels that we are able to provide. Also, again, when we think about overall investment in economic um thinking about our small businesses and how much they rely on the foot traffic from residents you all have likely been reading the articles in the paper or are directly connected with some of the work that the school district is doing again we know this impact on declining birth rates also having fewer families in fort collins our schools rely on that steady population to be able to continue schools in all of our neighborhoods. So the ripple effects are pretty significant. And then lastly, I would just say again, as we think about how we're preparing for our city services for the future, with the aging demographic that we have, you know, are we adjusting our services to be ready to prepare for this changing kind of age in place demographic? Are we wanting to try and shift this curve in any way and if so we know that again some of the things that we have been doing up to this point we're going to need to look at differently so we share that in the spirit of sort of again thought-provoking information for council as you prepare for your retreat this weekend and with that I will pause and ask again if you have any other questions on this component I know we've gotten to some of them as we've gone along and then we want to switch to the finances. Great. We'll go to questions. Yeah. Melody. Thank you. So I was just thinking,

you know, as we were looking at the housing affordability and then also the commuting,

I was wondering if we have any data around of those top three employment areas, our healthcare services, education, and manufacturing. Do we happen to know what percentage of those folks are commuting in? I was just wondering to what degree the housing

costs are impacting specific fields and forcing that in commuting. Yeah, I'm going to invite

Sana Kendall, who is our economic health director up. She can maybe give a little bit of insight. And again, if we need to follow up, we can do that as well. Yes, so we can actually track that

through the industry specific. One of the things I would mention in the commuting pattern is most of that in Fort Collins is happening. The commuting is happening from our neighboring communities. So we are seeing that about 1% will be commuting though from Fort Collins to Colorado Springs. So just to see that demographic is huge. So we can go into those industries and share the percentages of those, but we do that in a follow-up memo. That would be wonderful because I think when

we're talking about housing, we're often kind of discussing, is it workforce housing? What exactly

are we missing? And I think when we're looking at the salaries of the kinds of professionals who we're seeing commuting most from our surrounding communities that can help us put the puzzle together. So I'd appreciate that. Other questions? Pam? Yes. All right. I have to scroll back up. Okay. A couple questions that I wrote down during the presentation, which was so comprehensive, and thank you, first of all. For the survey, survey um just wanting to make sure that i understood just in terms of the quality of life and the budget priorities that that was the online survey how was that data collected yeah thank you

for that question so we actually do a um mail survey a statistically valid mail survey we also do open the survey up for people to take online and then our um research consultants that we work with on that survey. They validate the information that's coming online to make sure that it's, again, statistically proportionally. And then they actually integrate it with the mail survey. So we do end up with a combined result, but they ensure that it maintains a statistical validity.

Okay. Yeah. I think that was my question. Is it overly representative of one population or another in our community, or is it a really good cross-section of ideas and thoughts?

Yeah, and they do some weighting of the data to make sure that, again, it is reflective of the various demographics. We also have that survey data, and we can make sure we get this to all of you, that is by different geographic areas of the community. Again, you can look at different demographic slices. So there really is a lot of rich data there. This is just the very highest level tonight. Yes, of course.

Yeah, I would be curious also in who's participating and what gaps there are and if there would be a way of looking at that in the future for people who aren't able to participate. Okay, then we're going to ricochet over to talking about climate change. Just a question of as our demographics, our overall population is slightly decreasing. This is like such a newbie question, but could you give me just an idea of the issues that we're facing as a community in terms of responding to climate change and our resilience, our ability to be resilient? Like what is our maximum population goal or what can we support with existing resources? This is a big question. And we can, it's something that I, just in looking at this, like, population is decreasing, but where can we support it as things become a little bit more unstable?

Yeah, so I feel like this is a really big question. There's a little bit. And one that we might put in the category of do a follow-up work session. What I will say that we didn't include in here just in terms of population build-out, that our current population build-out that's based really more on available land and development patterns is about 255,000 people. And last I heard, and I'm going to look at Clay, 30 years, give or take?

He's going to come up and tell me if that's not quite accurate. Yeah, I think just a couple of things. I think we used to speak about things in terms of build out just to try and talk about what we expect our population to be when we Build out every last piece of land in Fort Collins. I think what happens in reality is there's also a lot of redevelopment that happens, too So that's a moving target. And so yeah, I think generally speaking We've spoke about that as being between 240 and 250,000 people that was at a time and more projections where that would be about 2040 or 2050 based on population growth of about one and a half percent per year or two percent per year and Now that we're at 0.6 percent That's gonna be obviously much further out. And so I would say that's probably a long ways away And wouldn't be able to give you a very good guess on the spot tonight, but I think we could maybe follow up

Yeah, and then I heard in there again your question around some of more of the climate impacts and what we're thinking in terms of community resiliency and certainly Certainly our Climate Future team has done some work in that space and would be happy to do some follow-up information on that topic. I know it feels random, but I...

I think it's something to consider, I think, as we're talking about that. And then...

Sorry, I have a follow-up question for Clay real fast on the population growth number. Like, projecting out farther now, so it used to be 2040, and now we're going to go out farther to our buildup. Does that have any... Like, what would you consider? Are there ramifications? Are there negatives? Are there positives? Is it just what it is? Like, what should someone consider when we talk about now moving that out farther than we anticipated?

it? I think what it gives us is actually a little bit more time to think about where we invest to support the type of community that we want. I think that when we look backwards about, I think, a lot of the conversations around growth in our community and the pace of growth, it was always very difficult to provide the parks, the schools, the roads, et cetera, to keep up with development when growth is 2 or 3 percent per year, because those numbers get pretty big pretty quickly. And when we're talking about growth rates that are lower, it just means that we have a little bit more time to try and be a little bit more proactive and think about those sorts of things. So I think the downside is obviously it means that we're not the center of northern Colorado or may not be in 20 years as a result of some of those trends. So that's sort of the trade-off is, yeah, we have a little bit more time to be thoughtful and maybe some less resources than what we're accustomed to having. But they're all hard questions. They're just different questions. And so I would hesitate to put a value on it other than to say that we would have to think a little bit differently if those growth rates continue to come downward and those become really challenging conversations if we're talking about decline. And so I would say that's probably the worst outcome or the most challenging thing to deal with is decline. But slower and steadier growth, I think, is probably an easier problem to deal with than really fast growth or decline. Yeah. OK. Thank you.

Sorry. One last question. And this is just thinking about the local, our neighboring communities that are showing population growth. Is there a connection between affordability and birth rate? That is like, are there more children in areas that are more affordable?

Um, so I don't know if I could do a, um, is there a sort of correlation? Again, I think we can provide the data for what it is. We do know, you know, I think about in Weld County, I think I saw like a quarter of their

houses are new since 2010. So there, it's a very different housing stock, which, um, you know, again, maybe attracting, uh, different, um, demographic. I don't know that for sure. So I can't really speak to correlation there. Sure.

Great. Yeah, Josh.

Sorry, one more while Clay is here. To what extent does water play a role in the affordability with Greeley as compared to Fort Collins? I've heard in my time that Greeley has much more access to water. I don't know if that's the case. Does that play a role in the difference?

Yeah, water plays a central role in all the decisions we make related to development, of course. And what I would say is that when we compare our rates for development compared to some of our communities in the region, usually we're not the most expensive or the cheapest. We're usually somewhere in the middle compared to all the other communities around us. Greeley and Fort Collins are both very fortunate in that we have a long history of purchasing water rights proactively. And so I would say and you know for cons agree There are probably two good communities to compare from that perspective and that we both have pretty strong water portfolios and senior water rights And Caleb probably able to speak better to Greeley than me on that one as far as the comparison goes But yeah, it's a it's a central component of our review And a central component of our operations as a local government

Yeah, and the only thing I would add to that. Thank you clay I agree is I think always important to note when we talk about Fort Collins It's not just the city of Fort Collins water. So it's pretty different whether you're looking at Fort Collins utilities or Fort Collins Loveland or Elko both in terms of How they approach their water what they have available and certainly their costs for development are quite disparate

Other questions I had a few additional questions

Do we know if the number of total workers in Fort Collins has changed over the years as we're aging?

Yes, we do know that You know every community loses and gains jobs every year

We do know that we still have quite a large in terms of the employment

I can get you the data in a follow-up email if you want the exact percentages

Yeah, just be curious not I mean jobs, but also number of workers as well. Okay, that'd be great And then I'm also curious for the employees traveling

Has that changed over time as we've implemented different things like the bus routes and the kind of more connectivity or is that remains? Kind of the same

It doesn't seem it seems like everyone's using their single vehicle So I'm just wondering if the regional transportation that we've implemented has made a difference

I told you we had a lot of staff here to fill in their individual areas.

So Karen Champagne with planning development and transportation. Hi.

I missed the first part of your question. I apologize, Mayor.

No, that's fine. It's really around the, we had that slide about employee travel and how 86% still travel in single vehicle.

So I'm just curious if any of the transportation regional things we've done have actually changed that at all.

Yeah, where we saw the shift in mode to where, so we did see a reduction in single occupancy trips. So that was trending in the right direction, although a small percentage. Where those, so the folks that were going from single occupancy vehicle, the majority were going to bicycle trips. Some were working from home now, so no trips. maybe 1% increase we saw in transit use. So that might be regional routes and things like that. So that tells us that mostly where folks are motivated to shift is in the bike space. Okay, thank you.

Yeah, so just to put in maybe a time frame on that data that Karen had shared, from 2018 to 2025 was the time period that we did that survey. And it was a 5%, again, reduction in single use. So, you know, again, it's slow work and every percent does matter. It matters.

Yeah. Great. Thank you. And then I just want to make sure that I'm, like, capturing this right in my head, that from the conversation, so decreased net migration, which is not zero yet, but trending downwards. but increase in older adults and decrease in children increase in housing costs and

Net importer of labor and while it's helpful for planning slower planning Some of the summary that I heard from you was you know schools having difficulty difficulty for Government services we rely less on we have less money available And then I think there was a third thing but I'm just trying to wrap my head around

Okay, if we didn't do anything and we continued on this path and changes in that both our community is still going to change

even if we're not growing that fast and we just stayed on this path of You know lower growth increase in older adults decreasing kids and increase in housing costs what that looks like for our city in

10 or 20 years So did I am I missing something?

Can I ask maybe a similar question that I believe and sauna may be correct me if I'm wrong but an aging population generally will purchase more services as opposed to products and goods and Services are not subject to sales tax in general. I think so that plays a role too. I think oh, yeah

No, yes, that is correct decrease support for local small businesses Yes, okay

Anything else? I mean it sounds like I don't want to be like doomsday But I'm just trying to make sure I'm understanding the picture of you know because people would say you know lower growth some people in our community want that and also it's a trade-off of what we want for our community so I'm just trying to make sure that I understand what that trade-off is if we continued on that

path of slower growth increased housing lower less kids you know what that means and what that looks

like yeah I mean I think what you're articulating is some of the again the reason we start with the community survey is like again overall people really love Fort Collins and the level of service and the type of service and what they're getting and being in just this community as it is. And we know that, again, there are some trends that we have to be paying attention to. And so I think you're asking the question that none of us can fully answer of, like, what would it look like in 10 to 20 years. But we do know if we continue with this that there will be a variety of impacts and it will look somewhat different.

Okay. Thank you. I just want to make sure. All right.

All right, we're gonna go to Chris and then we'll go to Amy and then Melanie

I guess part of my question and this goes I think this is I was maybe think of saving this for Caleb too

but I was just wondering

You know, I think the common sense Institute study and the labor market study that you guys presented together As well as the community survey like painted to me I guess a pretty clear picture of like a community that is still the regional job hub but whose families, especially families with children, are being pushed out into neighboring communities and forced to commute long distances in. And that's a pattern that I've seen in my own life and with my colleagues at school and stuff. My question is, do we have economic analyses that are looking at, to Clay's point earlier, Fort Collins has been somewhat growth skeptical over a certain number of years. So do we have like economic analyses that tell us what is the economic cost that we're giving up in order to pursue like lower growth policies? Like what are the how many school-aged children are we giving up to Weld County and forcing our schools to face closure?

Like what is the cost in terms of environmental degradation in terms of like agricultural land and wild lands that sprawl is pushing into?

Do we have economic and environmental studies that look at different choices between a growth skeptical and a growth positive mindset?

So I'm looking back at the team. I don't know that we have sort of economic studies based on certain policy choices like that. And if someone from the team tells me differently, please speak up. But I don't think we have done that level of analysis where, again, I think we have more, I'll say, straightforward data. We have a ton of economic data in terms of what's happening and what we're seeing in certain industries where we think we have opportunity. Next week, our economic team is going to be in front of you, again, talking about business incentive. That's something we haven't done a lot of in the past, candidly. We've been very limited in that. We think that's a policy that is worth talking about again right now in light of some of these demographic changes. So I would say, yes, we have a lot of data, but I don't think we have done it through the policy analysis lens that you're asking about.

Amy. I have some similar type questions, but I'm going to hold mine until after the presentation because I want to make sure that I'm asking a full question. So thank you.

Okay. Melanie. Yeah, thank you. And mine is less a question than just kind of a suggestion, having spoken to some folks on other policymaking boards in our community. But I know that we do have a joint PSD county city policy. And as you're talking about, you know, we have fewer young children, fewer, our schools are under enrolled, housing costs tie in there, regional transportation. I'm not sure exactly what the ins and outs are of that committee, but I do know that when I've spoken with some folks on other governing or policymaking bodies, they've expressed an interest in maybe having a little bit more of a critical dive into some of

these data where we're having crossover, because I do think we're at a point where we're really interdependent and some of these trends are having universal impacts. So whoever lands on that committee, I'm hoping that you guys can strike a nice balance to where when we're having these conversations, we're getting to hear the perspective of, hey, when I'm at with the county and PSD, they brought up this trend that we may not be aware of as a city. And Kelly, you attend those

meetings as well, correct? Yes, I do attend those meetings. And that will be one of the committees that as council's doing their selection, we'll be looking for someone to, two people actually, I believe to serve on that committee and one of our first things we'll do is really be planning for the year of how does that committee

One of us focus its time perfect. I think that could be really valuable. Thanks

Great any other questions or comments? Okay, I think we'll move on

All right, Caleb you are up and I bet you would like the clicker

Thank you. Well good evening mayor and council so pleasure to be here this evening As we get into the presentation tonight, I'll just go ahead and skip to what our overview is tonight. My main goal tonight is just for particularly for the new council members to equip you with very initial knowledge on some municipal finance concepts and start to get you comfortable with your role as a council member in the fiscal stewardship of this community. In addition to that, I want to give you some specific financial information that we think will be helpful ahead of your retreat starting on Saturday. And a little bit of a preview of what we are currently seeing for the upcoming budget process, which will be one of the most significant policy considerations that the council undertakes this year. So the direction that we're seeing... What we're seeking here is very similar to the previous item tonight. We really, this is an initial overview. Happy to dive deeper in any of these topics with the council, particularly knowing that the budget process is going to be a significant consideration for the council this year. Definitely interested if you have any feedback now on things that you want staff to be considering as we plan for the upcoming budget process.

SO MOVING INTO SOME CORE MUNICIPAL FINANCE CONCEPTS, I'LL JUST START WITH A COUPLE OF BASICS AND

SOME TERMS AND DOCUMENTS THAT YOU MIGHT HEAR REFERRED TO. SO THE CITY HAS AN ANNUAL COMPREHENSIVE

FINANCIAL REPORT, OR ACFER. THIS IS OUR FULLY AUDITED FINANCIAL STATEMENT. EXTERNAL AUDITS are conducted annually by an independent CPA firm so you the council can be assured that

the city is properly spending public funds. We follow a variety of best practices with

how we manage public funds including generally accepted accounting principles, the governmental accounting standards board. We have been recognized by the government finance officers association

EVERY YEAR SINCE 1986 FOR OUR EXCELLENCE IN FINANCIAL REPORTING,

AND OUR STRONG FISCAL MANAGEMENT IS EVIDENCED BY THE CITY'S VERY FAVORABLE BOND RATINGS.

JUST A QUICK OVERVIEW OF FUND ACCOUNTING AND APPROPRIATIONS. EACH FUND MUST BE BALANCED WITH REVENUES, VERY SIMPLY EACH YEAR, WITH REVENUES COMING IN AND EXPENDITURES GOING OUT. this is a requirement both in state law and the city charter and it ensures fiscal discipline transparency and compliance while clearly separating tax supported activities from fee supported services so looking at the chart here governmental funds are funds that support core city services they generally operate on tax revenue or other non-fee revenues and they operate on spending authority that is approved by the council. Examples of this would include the general fund, which is for lack of, or for a really simple explanation, probably the city's main checking account, and other special revenue funds, transportation funds, parks and rec fund, urban renewal authority fund, debt service fund, capital project fund, among many others. The second category we have are enterprise funds. These are fee-based cost recovery funds similar to sort of a quasi-business model. So examples of this would be our utility funds, water, wastewater, stormwater, electric, and golf. And then finally on this chart, you can see that the city charter requires

that spending cannot exceed revenue that is planning to come into the fund. So there has to be revenue either projected to be available or available fund balance or reserves

AS WE CALL HIM HERE. AND COUNCIL APPROVAL IS REQUIRED BEFORE EXPENDITURES CAN OCCUR AT THE FUND LEVEL. COUNCIL GIVES THAT APPROVAL THROUGH APPROPRIATIONS AND ALSO AUTHORIZES THE TRANSFER OF FUNDS THROUGH APPROPRIATIONS. SO THERE WERE SOME APPROPRIATION ACTIONS ON YOUR AGENDA TONIGHT.

THAT IS A FAIRLY COMMON THING YOU WILL SEE, THOUGH THE LARGE AND PRIMARY APPROPRIATION

ACTION YOU TAKE IS THROUGH THE BUDGET PROCESS.

SO NOT TO GET TOO DEEP INTO A TECHNICAL RABBIT HOLE, BUT THIS IS SOME IMPORTANT GROUNDING ABOUT WHEN YOU SEE SOME OF OUR FINANCIAL STATEMENTS, UNDERSTANDING OUR FUND BALANCES, OUR RESERVES, AS WE CALL THEM, AND NET POSITIONS. SO THERE ARE DIFFERENT CLASSIFICATIONS OF OUR FUND BALANCES HERE, GOING FROM THE MOST CONSTRAINED TO THE LEAST CONSTRAINED. THE SPECIFIC ONES I'LL FOCUS ON, RESTRICTED FUND BALANCE. SO IF AN EXTERNAL PARTY PUTS A REQUIREMENT ON OUR FUND BALANCE, FOR EXAMPLE, THE 3% TAXPAYER BILL OF RIGHTS OR TABOR RESERVE THAT SITS IN OUR GENERAL FUND, THAT IS A PORTION OF RESTRICTED FUND BALANCE. COMMITTED FUND BALANCE IS FUND BALANCE THAT IS CONSTRAINED BY PARTICULAR CITY COUNCIL DIRECTION. So for example thinking of our general fund again the council has direction that we maintain a 45-day operational expenditure reserve in our general fund Assigned that fund balance is the next category. This is specific purposes that have been designated by the city manager per

Policy but are not specifically constrained by council and then finally unassigned is basically excess fund balance that's available for any purpose that's in alignment with what that fund's

revenues can be spent on. Now, I know that was a very technical walkthrough, but where that becomes important, this is just an illustrative example for the city's general fund. And once again, just kind of our main operational checking account for the governmental services or non-utility services that we provide. There's a lot going on on this chart. The main thing that I want YOU TO FOCUS ON IS THAT BLUE BAR AT THE TOP FOR EACH OF THE YEARS. THAT IS THE AMOUNT OF UNASSIGNED OR EXCESS FUNDS THAT THE CITY HAD AT THE END OF EACH FISCAL YEAR. AND THAT REPRESENTED TYPICALLY A MIXTURE OF OVERPERFORMANCE AND REVENUE VERSUS PROJECTIONS AND UNDER EXPENDITURE OF APPROPRIATION AUTHORITY OR JUST SPENDING A LITTLE BIT LESS MONEY THAN WE HAD PLANNED ON. THE REASON I HIGHLIGHT THAT IS THAT MONEY TYPICALLY THEN HAS ROLLED INTO THE NEXT BUDGET PROCESS AS A ONE-TIME FUNDING SOURCE TO BE ABLE TO ADDRESS CERTAIN ITEMS. AT THE END OF 2024, FOR THE FIRST TIME IN ANYONE'S RECENT MEMORY, IN THE GENERAL FUND, WE DID NOT HAVE ANY EXCESS RESERVES THAT WERE GENERATED AT THE END OF THE FISCAL YEAR. THAT HAS PUT SIGNIFICANT PRESSURE ON OUR BUDGET BOTH AS WE JUST WENT THROUGH THE 2026 BUDGET REVISION PROCESS WHICH I'LL BE TALKING ABOUT IN THE UPCOMING SLIDE AND ALSO IN OUR 2027-2028 BIANNUAL BUDGET PROCESS THAT'S COMING UP AS WE DON'T PARTICULARLY EXPECT A LOT OF THIS ONE-TIME REVENUE TO BE AVAILABLE. THIS HAS HISTORICALLY BEEN USED FOR ASSET MANAGEMENT, PURSUING CITY COUNCIL PRIORITIES, being able to set up pilot projects, things like that. And that is a source that we are really seeing shrink. Now, there's two sides of the coin here. The city is in good financial position. And once again, this is the general fund. So the general fund is fully funded to the council's policy. The reason it says 60-day reserve here is there was a policy change in the 2025-2026 budget TO LOWER IT FROM 60 DAYS TO 45 DAYS. YOU'LL SEE A CHANGE ON THAT IN THE CHART WHEN IT COMES FOR COUNCIL REVIEW THIS SUMMER AFTER 2025 IS CLOSED AND AUDITED. BUT WE ARE IN GOOD FINANCIAL POSITION. HOWEVER, WE ARE ALSO UNDER A LOT OF PRESSURE BY NOT HAVING SOME OF THE EXCESS FUNDING THAT WE AS A CITY HAD COME TO RELY ON.

SO MOVING A LITTLE BIT INTO THE COUNCIL ROLE IN FINANCIAL STEWARDSHIP IN THE CITY, This chart is just a quick kind of reference guide for understanding the shared role that the council, city staff, and financial services have with our distinct yet complementary roles. All of these roles contribute to the long-term health of the city and are important for us collectively maintaining our transparency and integrity with the community. The finance department serves as the technical and compliance authority for the city. We oversee controls and risk mitigation, provide strategic analysis through forecasts and analytics. City leadership, led by the city manager, is responsible for translating the council's priorities and policy direction into operational and financial plans. LEADERS WITHIN THE CITY RECOMMEND BALANCED BUDGET TO MEET CHARTER AND CODE REQUIREMENTS AND LONG-TERM STRATEGIES BY INTEGRATING FINANCIAL OPERATIONAL AND STRATEGIC CONSIDERATION. THE CITY COUNCIL PLAYS A CENTRAL ROLE IN FINANCIAL STEWARDSHIP BY SETTING THE COMMUNITY'S PRIORITIES AND POLICY DIRECTION IN ADDITION TO ADOPTING THE CITY'S BIANNUAL BUDGET AND FINANCIAL POLICIES. COUNCIL PROVIDES OVERSIGHT TO ENSURE PUBLIC FUNDS ARE USED RESPONSIBLY AND ARE IN ALIGNMENT WITH COMMUNITY VALUES. WITHIN THE CONSTRAINTS OF TABOR, WHICH I MENTIONED EARLIER, COUNCIL DECISIONS DETERMINE HOW OUR COMMUNITY'S LIMITED RESOURCES ARE ALLOCATED TO BALANCE SERVICE LEVEL DEMANDS WITH THE COMPETING COMMUNITY PRIORITIES.

THIS CHART HERE IS JUST A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF THE FUNCTIONS WITHIN FINANCIAL SERVICES.

WHAT I'LL JUST NOTE ON THIS SLIDE IS THERE ARE A NUMBER OF FUNCTIONS WITHIN FINANCIAL SERVICES. I'M PLEASED TONIGHT TO BE JOINED BY THE ENTIRE FINANCIAL SERVICES MANAGEMENT

TEAM WHO WILL BE AVAILABLE TO HELP ME ANSWER ANY QUESTIONS THAT YOU HAVE.

FOR PURPOSES OF COUNCIL INTERACTION, YOU'LL ANNUALLY, AT LEAST ANNUALLY, SEE THE ACCOUNTING TEAM, PARTICULARLY AT COUNCIL FINANCE, WHEN WE REPORT ON THE RESULTS OF EVERY FISCAL YEAR.

AND THEN THE BUDGET PROCESS WILL BE ONE OF THE MOST SIGNIFICANT THINGS THAT YOU ENGAGE IN. BUT THERE IS A WHOLE SWEET OF SERVICES WITHIN FINANCE.

all right so moving into our financial snapshot this is a quick snapshot of the city's revenues in 2025 which is the fiscal year we just completed and 2026 payments for services represent the largest revenue category the largest portion of

this is utility payments. The city's fee structure is established to offset the costs for providing those primarily utility services, which include things like staff time, material, capital costs, capital replacements, and other service delivery costs. The second largest revenue stream for the city is sales and use tax. Sales and use tax is approximately 50 percent of the city's governmental REVENUE, OVER $200 MILLION PER YEAR. THIS REVENUE STREAM ALSO INCLUDES DEDICATED TAXES,

SUCH AS THE QUARTER CENT CAPITAL TAX WE DISCUSSED TONIGHT, NATURAL AREAS, STREET MAINTENANCE, AND THE HALF CENT, 2050 TAX FOR PARKS AND RECREATION, OUR CLIMATE FUTURE, AND TRANSPORTATION.

So this chart here is just a little bit of information on how the city's sales tax rate, including the voter-approved dedicated taxes, combines with other sales tax rates paid by consumers here in the city of Fort Collins.

So the 2026 sales tax rate is 8.3%. This includes 3.95% from state and county taxes and 4.35% for the city.

I will note that food for home consumption is taxed at a significantly lower rate of 2.25%.

And then for hotel accommodations, there is a 3% lodging tax that is added on on top of this total sales tax rate.

THIS CHART HERE SHOWS HOW WE COMPARE TO OTHER COMMUNITIES IN NORTHERN COLORADO IN TERMS OF OUR SALES TAX RATE.

YOU CAN SEE ON THIS CHART THAT WE ARE IN ONE OF THE HIGHER ENDS FOR NORTHERN COLORADO, THOUGH NOT THE HIGHEST. AND IF YOU LOOK AT SOME OF OUR IMMEDIATE COMMUNITIES AND TALKING ABOUT THE ECONOMIC TRENDS, MUTING PATTERNS,

where economic activity will occur.

I do think it is important, just for me to note, as your chief financial officer, that we are going to,

this is my opinion, we're going to need to keep our sales tax rates in mind and our competitive position in the region as businesses and consumers make choices over the coming years. This is the same chart, but just taking a larger view across the front range. you can see once you bring in a number of cities in the Denver metro area

we are more middle of the pack. I'll note that a lot of the cities in the Denver metro area also pay

for a regional transportation district tax and a small

cultural tax. Within Fort Collins' overall

tax rate we are funding similar services in terms of transport and a general fund contribution to our arts and culture fund.

ALL RIGHT, SO GETTING INTO EXPENSES AND TRANSFER AUTHORIZATION, YOU'LL RECALL FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE PRESENTATION THAT COUNCIL APPROVAL IS REQUIRED BEFORE EXPENDITURES OCCUR AT A FUND LEVEL. SO WHAT THIS SLIDE SPEAKS TO IS THE MECHANISM THAT STAFF PURSUES FOR COUNCIL TO REVIEW AND AUTHORIZE APPROPRIATIONS. ALL REVENUE IS PAIRED WITH PRIORITIZED FUNDING REQUESTS WITH MOST EXPENSES BEING AUTHORIZED THROUGH YOUR BIANNUAL BUDGET PROCESS. EACH YEAR IS APPROPRIATED SEPARATELY, SO THERE IS A REVISION PROCESS IN YEARS WHEN WE DO NOT PURSUE A FULL BIANNUAL PROCESS. AND TYPICALLY THE CHANGES ARE MINOR, THOUGH FOR THE REVISION PROCESS FROM 2025 TO 2026, THERE WERE MORE SIGNIFICANT CHANGES BASED ON SOME OF THE ECONOMIC CONDITIONS WE'RE SEEING. Appropriations can be considered at regular city council meetings. These supplemental appropriations are typically for things that could not be known at the time the budget was adopted, such as the award of grants or authorization to spend proceeds of debt issuances. Lastly, there are some administrative processes which provide a window to consolidate small, non-controversial changes to the budget, which are not known at the time of budgeting, and you'll typically see that as one package. in the fall.

In terms of the budgeting process, You may have heard that the city is moving away from the budgeting for outcomes or BFO process. So we have a 20-year history with this process. It has served us well, especially in an environment when the community was growing more quickly. The feedback that has been received most recently is that that process is no longer providing the insights needed to make effective decisions as services have expanded and economic conditions continue to shift. Based on council direction, we are moving forward towards a more focused priority-based budgeting methodology. The upcoming biannual budget process for 2027 and 2028 will be a transitional process as we move away from BFO into our new process. And we certainly plan to refine the budget process based on your feedback and other stakeholder feedback once we make it through the process. But the key changes that we're trying to respond to in terms of why we're moving to this new process is a desire for more transparency or digestibility and context for the community, particularly when they're looking at our budget document. And what we've heard from the council is a desire for better understanding of tradeoffs and insights into existing service levels. based on that we will be simple simplifying a lot of our budget materials compared to what you've previously seen understanding that transparency is rooted in clarity not volume staff will focus on developing program inventories and metrics which will provide more understanding of trade-offs for changes to service levels and we're going to attempt to get information together FOR OUR PROGRAM INVENTORY FOR THIS UPCOMING PROCESS, BUT WE DO ANTICIPATE IT WILL TAKE A FULL TWO OR THREE YEARS TO FULLY BUILD THAT OUT.

THIS IS A CHART WITH JUST SOME OF THE UPCOMING TOUCH POINTS IN THE BUDGET CALENDAR. TYPICALLY OR HISTORICALLY, OUR FIRST BUDGET TOUCH POINT WITH COUNCIL HAS BEEN A WORK SESSION IN LATE JUNE.

WE'RE REALLY LOOKING AT EXPANDING THAT CALENDAR THIS YEAR.

So in addition to the typical work session that we do with council in June and the typical process of work sessions and public hearings in the fall, we are planning to bring discussions of service area financial overviews to the council's finance committee to get insight and some early feedback, at least from a subset of council.

These early overviews will help provide a grounding and more context into the specific cost pressures that we're seeing in various services. And my hope is that we can leverage the role of the Finance Committee to provide more focused review and feedback ahead of the citywide budget conversation that happens in the summer.

Council finance meetings are public meetings and certainly hope that it will generate a lot of interest both among council and staff as we delve into that effort this spring.

So this is a snapshot of our expenses to provide some grounding in our current budget as we look ahead to the trends for our next budget.

THIS CHART SHOWS HOW THE CITYWIDE EXPENSES OF APPROXIMATELY 900 MILLION ARE ALLOCATED ACROSS THE CATEGORIES.

AND ONCE AGAIN, THIS INCLUDES OUR UTILITY ENTERPRISE FUNDS.

THIS CHART HERE IS SPECIFIC TO THE GENERAL FUND AND SHOWS HOW EXPENSES WERE ALLOCATED BY SERVICE AREA.

THIS CHART ALSO INCLUDES THE FUNDING THAT WE TRANSFER TO THE POOTER OF FIRE AUTHORITY PER THE INTERGOVERNMENTAL AGREEMENT THAT THIS COUNCIL HAS WITH PFA.

AND IT ALSO INCLUDES INTERNAL TRANSFERS, WHICH IS GENERAL FUND MONEYS THAT ARE TRANSFERRED TO OTHER GOVERNMENTAL FUNDS TO SUPPORT THEIR OPERATIONS.

THAT MEANS THE INVESTMENT LEVELS IN MANY OF THESE SERVICE AREAS ARE LARGER THAN THEIR DIRECT GENERAL FUND APPROPRIATION REFLECTS.

Overall, we see the most significant general fund investment is in public safety, which is very common for municipalities. And once again, the general fund is the main tax revenue-supported fund.

All right, so looking ahead.

So this chart here is showing our sales and use tax history. Once again, sales and use tax is by far the most important tax revenue source that the city has. What is happening in the annual blue bars? That is showing the total

amount of tax revenue that was received through 2025. And then what is in the budget for 2026 and forecasts at this point going into the next two-year budget cycle for 2027, 2028. I'll note a few things on this. Number one, you'll see that our sales and use tax collections for 2025 were fairly strong. The underlying data in that though is

there was a lot of one-time revenue that was associated with that sales and use tax collection. We had a very strong year with sales tax audits, voluntary disclosure agreements, and then you saw on Kelly's presentation about the strong performance that we had in building permits. Building permits pay at the time But when building permits are pulled, use taxes paid on building materials. So that's a very significant revenue source that we saw, but that also fluctuates.

We don't expect a repeat of that performance in 2026, which is why our budget is slightly lower. We do believe that the 2026 budget at this point is in a fairly conservative position.

And as I talk about the outlook over the next few years, there is a lot of economic uncertainty. So we think this is the right point as we begin the year, and we'll certainly be monitoring trends as we go throughout the year.

At this point, we are conservatively projecting 2% growth in sales and use tax for 2027 and 2028.

This is a little bit lower than our historical averages and, once again, reflects both some of the current economic uncertainty we're seeing and the overall shifts in demographic trends that was talked about in the previous presentation.

Once again, this is very preliminary, though, and we'll certainly be refining these forecasts as more data becomes available as we head into the summer. so this chart here is net taxable sales for the city of Fort Collins so these are sales that occurred in the city what what the blue bar is showing is is the city as a percentage of sales in the county and then the orange bar is showing the city's percentage of population in the county So what this shows is 20 years ago, even though Fort Collins was under 50 percent of the population in the county, we were collecting 70 percent of the sales tax activity in the county. That has shifted over the years, both as the region has grown up around us and become more economically competitive, and as online sales have significantly increased as well in online sales, our sales tax is collected based on the address that the sale is made to. So you can see that our sales tax position in the county has significantly eroded over the last 20 years. What's really important about this is a lot of the levels of service that we have set for our community were at a time when other people were coming into Fort Collins and spending their money and generating tax revenue. And we're not seeing as much of that trend now.

In terms of expense pressures, so personnel costs continue to rise. We have a collective bargaining contract with our police. We have the need every year to ensure that our workforce as a whole maintains competitive compensation with the region. We continue to see upward pressure in benefits costs. Probably more significantly, at least in the past year, we've seen significant costs as contracts are renewed, as we go to purchase equipment, vehicles. We have seen also good news items, significant growth in our grocery tax rebate program, but that's putting additional pressure on the budget and was a significant issue that had to be resolved in the 2026 budget revision and will need to be permanently addressed in the upcoming biannual process. And then as we move away from pandemic era funding with the American Rescue Plan Act and other sources, that one-time funding that

had been available is no longer there, and that has put pressure to find other resources for programs that we find value to maintain and keep going. I mentioned earlier that in 2026,

there was a very significant budget work that had to take place. So 2025-2026 is our current two-year budget. So that budget work occurred in 2024. Between the summer of 2024 and early 2025,

we, like many other cities up and down the front range, realized that we were not seeing the growth in ongoing sales tax revenue or net taxable sales that we had anticipated in the budget. Fortunately, we made up some of that with the one-time revenue that I talked about, in that particularly we were not meeting the expenditure assumptions that we had in the budget on personnel as a lot less turnover was happening than we had planned on.

so there was a 15.4 million dollar shortfall in the general fund budget between expenditures that were coming in higher than projected and revenues that were coming in lower than projected that the

council worked to close the last council worked to close this fall some highlights from that is

there were 26 vacant positions that were eliminated compensation increases for employees

for non-collective bargaining unit employees were lowered from 3% to 2%. There is a hiring freeze that still is in place that was necessary to help us both meet the budget for 2025, which we just completed, and is continuing into 2026 to help generate some one-time savings. And we are doing a deliberate and phased release of that hiring freeze to ensure that we meet our savings targets FOR THIS CURRENT YEAR. IN ADDITION TO THAT, THERE WERE A NUMBER OF SERVICE LEVELS THAT WERE ADJUSTED.

ONE THING I'LL NOTE IS OF THAT $15.4 MILLION BUDGET SHORTFALL, ABOUT 30% OF THE REDUCTIONS WERE ONE-TIME OPPORTUNITIES.

SO THAT WILL CREATE SOME PRESSURE AS WE MOVE INTO THE NEXT FULL BUDGET PROCESS TO PERMANENTLY RESOLVE SOME OF THOSE ISSUES.

so in terms of the preliminary outlook for the 2027 budget you know I could probably talk about

this for 20 minutes but I'll just note there's a lot of economic uncertainty right now and certainly

from shifting in chaotic policy direction from Washington is not helping there is a lot of concerns, certainly about affordability, which we heard tonight, and really questions in whether consumer spending is going to be able to maintain at the current levels that we're seeing, which, once again, consumer spending is vitally important for the sales tax revenue that the city collects. So with that economic uncertainty and the lower than we have experienced in previous serious revenue growth that we're currently projecting, as well as the impact of inflation on cost pressures for various goods and services that the city has to provide, ensuring that our employee compensation stays competitive, that we can meet the obligations that we have made in our collective bargaining agreement with police, addressing some of the one-time funding programs. We are anticipating at this point that there will be a similar budget shortfall in the general fund in 2027 as was experienced in 2026. So just trying to be as transparent and honest about the information we're seeing up front that we don't think that from a top line dollar amount that 2027 will be a significant additive year. I think that almost anything new or expanded that the council is interested in doing will have to come at the expense of doing something LESS OR STOPPING DOING SOMETHING SOMEWHERE ELSE.

WITH THAT, IN TERMS OF HIGH PRIORITY PROJECTS THAT FINANCE IS WORKING ON, WE HAVE A COUPLE DEBT ISSUANCES THAT WE'RE WORKING ON. MOST NOTABLE FOR THE COUNCIL IS THE SOUTHEAST COMMUNITY CENTER AND WORKING ON CERTIFICATES OF PARTICIPATION AS PART OF THE COUNCIL APPROVED FUNDING STACK FOR THAT PROJECT. WE'RE VERY EXCITED TO PARTNER WITH COMMUNITY SERVICES ON THAT. I talked extensively about the 2027-2028 new budget process. Really excited about the budget process. I came up as a budget director so I can nerd out on budget all night. I won't now, but we're really excited about that in finance. Then finally, modernization of systems and processes.

Just one example I'll note is the city's Enterprise Resource Planning, or ERP, software, which is our main financial and human resources software, is 30 years old and near its end of life. So that's a topic we'll be discussing with council this year about the need to replace that, and it will be a very significant organizational project. So I know I went through a lot of information tonight, and I'll be handing out a quiz now to make sure. No, but no, seriously, this.

This was intended to be a very quick presentation and I know there was a lot of ground. I am certainly happy to follow up either with questions tonight or if there's additional information needed. Happy to meet with any of you to talk about any of these areas in more details and just very pleased to be working with this new council and thank you for your time tonight. Well, thank you, Caleb, for the thorough and informative presentation. It is helpful to get grounded, so I appreciate it. Do council members have any questions? Yeah, Amy.

I just have a quick question about the adjusted service levels. What was impacted in that cut that we can maybe anticipate this next year?

Yes, that's a great question. What I can send out to the council is we cataloged a whole impacts document of everything that was adjusted.

So it's too extensive to list tonight because in addition to the vacant FTE reductions, there was a number of other tweaks to service levels. So we have a whole document and can provide that background information to you.

Other questions? Yeah, Josh.

I guess, and if it's maybe too big, the follow-up information would be good. but when it says addressing one-time funded programs, is that reference to a slide before, the ongoing programs that are funded with one-time funding?

Yeah, so it's referencing, it's a number of things that it's referencing. Just one example I'm thinking about is the grocery tax rebate. So the solution, so the grocery tax rebate between 2025 and 2026 grew to be about twice the size of what we had budgeted, which is great. that we're seeing more utilization in the community, and it creates a financial issue that needed to be resolved. So the solution to that was to use some one-time funding that was available to close that for 2026. So that is an example of a permanent issue that will need to be addressed on an ongoing basis in 2027, 2028. There's a number of other items that we have traditionally funded through things like general fund reserves, like I was talking about earlier, in the asset management space and being able to take care of some of our facilities. There's some issues with how we have funded our fleet, things like that, that will all need to be addressed. So another issue, just in transparency, that's on top of my mind, photo traffic enforcement revenues from that program are not coming in as high as we projected. And there's a lot of good news with that. We're really seeing intended policy impacts of that expansion with lower rates of speeding. Hopefully the trends we've seen with less traffic fatalities will certainly continue. But that's also creating a significant budgetary pressure in that The revenue that had been anticipated from that program was allocated in the most recent biannual budget process. So there's a lot of those different types of pressures. And my hope, if the council's interested in doing this, is to be able to take a lot of more deep dives into a lot of those specific programmatic items in the council finance committee this year.

Great. Any other questions? Oh, sorry.

I have one. So looking at neighboring communities, and this is such a great comprehensive presentation, but looking at the comparable cities and where we fall, and also just in Northern Colorado, are revenue sources similar amongst those other communities? I mean, do they have a similar breakdown between the payments by residents for city services and sales taxes, or is the revenue source a little different?

Yeah, that's a great question. Part of it is dependent on what services the city provides. So I most recently worked for the city of Greeley. We didn't have all the utilities that Fort Collins does. So Greeley does not have a light and power department or broadband internet. So that's not part of their budget. So it really is dependent in some senses per city, like what services are being provided. I will say if you look at a lot of other cities general fund budgets, I made the comment that You know our investment in public safety is the largest portion of our general fund budget That is very common to to other cities up and down the front range as well. That's that's one of the largest Services that almost every city provides and it's a significant cost pressure

Other questions I just had two questions One is about the general fund reserves. I just want to make sure I'm understanding it correctly. The 60-day policy, which is now the 45-day policy, that reserve has to be separate than the Tabor emergency. Our general fund policy is way higher than Tabor reserves, so they have to remain separate?

Correct.

So the council's policy is we have a 45-day operational reserve in the general fund, and that is on top of our 3% Tabor reserve. you know i think in practical terms it would almost that the tabor reserve is so restrictive it would almost outside of some real exigent emergency be impossible to spend that and replenish it within the state's mandated time frame so um i do think it's wise policy that

those are separate separate reserves okay that's helpful thank you and then the program inventory did i hear you say it was going to take two to three years so we're going to do our best attempt

to pull together program inventory knowing some of our departments and service areas are at different levels of maturity on that we're going to get as much information as we can for the

council in this budget process and then um i i just don't feel comfortable committing that we will have a fully built out and um top of the line product um this budget process but we're going to get you what we have and then we we certainly expect to be able to deliver a full and comprehensive program inventory for the next budget process okay that's actually i was hoping

you were going to say that, that we can have something in the meantime. It doesn't have to be polished, but just getting this going is really helpful. So I'm glad that we'll have something to work off of. So thank you for that work. Okay, any other questions? Yeah, Chris.

Yeah, I just want to thank you for all the work that you did. I think it was super helpful as a total beginner. In terms of the general fund with the slide here, to me it looked like from 2017 to 2020, there was like a gradual decline and then a jump up in 2021 and then another gradual decline. Like, is that like, is that a structural decline with like one-time funding from COVID era? Or is that, what am I, or is that more of a random thing? That's just, which page number? This is

page eight in that presentation. Page eight.

It's like, there's a slow decline from 2017 to 2020 and it jumps up and then it looks like

declining again? Yes, that's a really good question. So I would say part of the answer for,

and I'll give the short answer tonight, and I'd love to sit down and talk about the long answer. The short answer is, particularly after coming out of COVID, and Fort Collins was not unique in this,

most local governments really saw a boom in revenues and less expenditures than projected. If you think about inflation really heated up in 2021, 2022, sales and use taxes are main source of revenue. One of the main benefits, if you want to call it that, of inflation is we immediately see kind of that revenue increase proportionally with it. So part of it is that,

Part of it as pandemic funding was available for certain programs or other expenditures that caused expenditure savings to occur elsewhere in the budget. So I will say just having looked at a lot of different municipal budgets over the last couple years, this is a pretty typical curve that happened coming out of the pandemic, both with the revenue boom, with under-expending expenditure authority.

But I could give you the 30-minute answer if you're interested at some point in the future.

Sure. I guess I was just my main question is less about the bump because I get the bump and more about the decline on either end of the bump.

And, you know, I could I could go back and talk with my team a little bit about the years before COVID.

I would say generally there's there's a lot of specific factors that are occurring every fiscal year as well.

So I'm not sure I can give you a clear answer tonight on the years before COVID. Thanks. Other questions

Okay, see none. Thank you. Do you have what you need? I think we do too. So thank you very much

Do council members have any announcements?

All right seeing none we will adjourn good night for Collins

Thank you.