City Council Work Session — April 14, 2026

to order. Will the city manager please provide a review of tonight's work session agenda?

Yes, thank you, Mayor. Good evening, everyone. We have a full agenda this evening with four items. We're going to start with our annual report and presentation from Poudre Fire Authority. We then have a community report from our district attorney, Gordon McLaughlin.

We are then going to move into more of an internal project, actually, an overview of our enterprise resource planning, what we will call ERP project. And then finally, we're going to end with a

discussion on the economic development pipeline and business retention and expansion framework.

And we'll probably call that one BRE for short. So we'll try not to do too many acronyms,

but a lot of long titles this evening. So I am pleased to introduce our fire chief, Derek Bergson. We are going to turn it over to him and he's joined by several from his team to answer questions, but chief, take it away.

All right, thank you very much for the opportunity to be here and thank you for everybody attending the dinner earlier in the quiz everyone got an A-plus so

First starting out. I just want to thank our district board members Dave Pusey behind me and Mike to Tulio who are present here today

And our command staff and especially paid Patty Haley S And Haley B and Nancy for all their work prepare the materials for tonight

So why I'm here is to deliver our annual report, which is part of our intergovernmental agreement

That's part of the requirement to come to council to give a presentation and then and possibly explore some solutions for revenue challenges

And what I'd like from you is if you could ask questions and be inquisitive because that'll make this definitely more enjoyable, so

All right, so starting out just a quick overview of the organization how many full-time positions we had One thing I just want to call out special on this is our volunteer firefighters. This past weekend, I was able to spend Saturday at Station 11, which was a great day up at Redstone Canyon, where we completely remodeled the entire station for our volunteers that protect their own homes.

And it's a great component of PFA that we have that service, which is quite a ways from our nearest station. It's about a 35 to 40-minute drive to get to that area. and they've been integral when we've had wildfires of working up there and protecting their own homes and protecting the community down here. So it's a neat attribute that PFA has as the volunteer and our seasonal firefighters that we have that work at Horsetooth. Where we serve? I forgot I'm doing the clicking, so.

All right, where we serve, we have eight stations in Fort Collins and five stations that are in the district.

Several of those stations are scattered geographically across to provide the best response time and coverage. What we really focus on with our response time is what we call our earth for effective response force Able to assemble the amount of personnel needed to mitigate any type of incident throughout the entire area that we covered And everyone already knows how many square miles that were responsible for so it's quite a large span that we cover in the area that we serve

Some of the major incidents and deployments that we've had over in

2025 a couple instances on the left we had deployments we respond on a national level we went out four times for wildland deployments to other states to help them with large wildfires

and then we also have a large contingency that's part of the urban search and rescue which is a federally deployed asset and we had two deployments they went out for water rescue efforts

just one thing of note a little over two weeks ago we had the sterry fire at highway 1 and 287 Just want to touch on that one quickly had a lot of questions We had 30 mile an hour sustained winds that day was 70 mile an hour gusts

And we had a fire that started off and we're able to mitigate that pretty quickly contain it just to a couple acres Working the Department of Fire and Prevention and Control

They did an estimate have we not been able to get that fire under control would have impacted about 1300 homes and roughly about 400 residents

So with a great work of our crews and partnership with the Sheriff's Department other surrounding departments able to get that fire into control very quickly in some pretty harsh conditions.

911 responses.

Denzel got the question right for total calls. One thing that comes out to is 62 calls per day.

So the crews are very busy. It's about a call every 23 minutes, and that's just a breakdown.

We talked about the highest number of calls are rescue and emergency medical calls. We have some others on there, good intent. Some of those are typically examples of a third-party caller.

if they smell smoke in the area or they think there's an illegal fire by them and

some of the service calls that we go on to make up that 9.3 percent or lift

assist car unlocks accidental medical alarms going off that's what we code those at and if you have any questions where I'm going please ask

accreditations and awards I want to thank City Manager DiMartino for going with us down to Orlando we went in front of the full Commission hearing and they reviewed our site visit that we had from four peers across the United States. We're one of 340 departments in the world that are accredited. This is a very prestigious honor. It's something that we have to continue to maintain. You're up for reaccreditation every five years. There's a

tremendous amount of work that goes into it, and the Center for Public Safety Excellence really

focuses on outcomes, how we deliver our service to the community, how we evaluate that, and how we get feedback from that. So it's very important to us as an organization that we maintain that. And then that also carries over to our company officers that we have 63 of them that are designated that have the chief fire officer, fire officer, or the other titles up there. It's just a way of having a third party verifying validate that you have the skills and abilities needed to fulfill that rank and designation.

The heart of a safe community. This is a project that we're working on with a lot of stakeholders. And Chief Borella is here who adds up the EMS is really aligning our resources.

The ultimate goal is to save more lives for the community. We want to create a

robust system for chain of survival just not including the 911 center till when we arrive with UC health But what does that work that goes on before and it really comes down to training our community on beginning hands-only CPR and

really emphasizing that throughout our community with our external AEDs that are available and we want to continue to expand on that the

partnerships that we've had and really want to highlight is a partnership at the Poudre School District I'm having over 600 high school students trained this year is pretty incredible and really thank Superintendent Brian Kingsley for that partnership

And when I first met with him he's like it sounds like a great plan We're all in and he has been and he's conveyed that throughout his entire organization so very appreciative of that

The work that we do protecting the community We have our community health program that goes out and is really focused on collaboration and partnerships But the effort is focused on prevention versus the reaction that we do in a 911 call comes in We're able to identify patients that we with UC health That are going to have a higher propensity to call 911 to go to the hospital We're able to go out and visit them in their own home link them up with resources Provide them education on their insurance make sure they have prescriptions they can get a primary care provider And that has been pretty incredible benefits to the people actually staying in their own home and staying healthy And that is supported by UC health they fund two EMTs and then we're going to be bringing our contract to our Board for approval hopefully in April here that they're also going to add a licensed clinical social worker Which really adds another dynamic and another layer to that service that we're able to provide And more on the prevention side is our smoking carbon monoxide alarms that we partner with Red Cross Fort Collins 911, UC Health, Colorado State, that we go out to the community. We installed 431 last year. Then also the partnership with Walgreens. Having it in the community where people can come get their vaccines and, like I said, trying to keep them healthy and put the time and effort on the preventative side.

Coming up here shortly, in a couple weeks, we're going to have a new recruit academy begin. We're very fortunate when you look across the United States, being accredited, we have an opportunity to meet with a lot of other fire departments.

Majority of fire departments are struggling with applicants. They have many open vacancies and that's common. We had 900 applicants which were probably going to end up maybe hiring 20 to 24 of them which is pretty incredible to have that opportunity. What we try to do is really decrease the barriers to get people from our own community because we know if they live here and their family's here

they're probably going to stay. So out of this 12, 7 of them are from our service area and 5 are from Fort Collins. And out of that 12, 5 of them did not Have EMT and that was one of the barriers were identified when someone found out they wanted to be a firefighter For them to get an EMT class to find out where it is to be able to do the ride-along

So we removed that and we actually paid for them to go to EMT class to get them certified And those five probably would not have had a career at Poudre fire authority But now they do and they're gonna be starting on April 27th, so pretty excited about that The drone city resource. I know you heard about that quite a bit. That's continuing to work Like I said, we've had over 900 flights through the March when we were prepared this So we've been using it quite often we use it at the Willis fire just last week really gave us some good vantage point where the fire was going That was impinging on some residential properties And we're able to identify what resources were needed where they needed to go and what our risk was So it's a great resource and we're looking to continue to expand that just other uses that we can use it for some of the capital projects we have is Transitioning to a new headquarters hopefully come in the fall or the first of next year and we're working on redoing station five on harmony road

some of the save the dates probably the biggest one that personally I enjoy the most is the EMS survivors event on May 20th

I know some of you have been there we bring back survivors

that had cardiac arrest or severe trauma and they come and meet their responders for the first time and that's from the 911 staff with the Fort Collins police

to our firefighters to UC Health and any bystanders that helped out with that

and it's a very moving event so it's pretty incredible we have Rachel who's going to sing the national anthem again from HR. So appreciate Teresa connecting us with her. But yeah, it's just an incredible event.

So that moved to my number one instead of the 4th of July.

But you know I had to throw that in there. So making a transition, talked about some of the challenges we have with our revenue.

So this just points out some of the challenges that we identified.

The next slide will give a little breakdown. the city contribution increase ratio for this year was 0.6 percent and the district was 22 percent so going into the next the historical contribution comparison over the years has been pretty pretty balanced we've really focused on that 80 20 percent split a lot of that has is tied into the funding to the call ratio and then area of coverage the revenue that we became Concerned with is a trend that has been going down over the last three years I'm just an example if the city had maintained or been able to the 80% the last three years I would equate it to about 20 million dollars extra for PFA to fund a lot of our capital projects one thing the District board has been doing is doing evaluation of some of the impacts with the Senate bill that's been passed That's put a limit on our taking the mill and I'm going to cover that a little bit in the end here Just an overview of some of our current facility needs we talked about station 5 we're gonna we're beginning pre-work on Assessment for this one this year and hopefully begin construction next year That one is in the critical condition and the other two station 2 and 3 are in poor condition

Some of the things I identify those as poor is lacking separate bathrooms showers bedrooms some of the cancer mitigation Items that have been introduced since the last 40 years or 60 years since these buildings were built

Same thing as a workout. They can't they don't have a workout bay They have to work out in the apparatus bay Which is not conducive because of the carcinogens on the turnout gear the fire trucks And it's just this is where they live a third of their life for 48 hours at a time

So we want to make sure that we do the updates and make sure that they're all current with the safety measures that have in place And I would offer up to any council member if you'd like to take a visit of these stations And then we can take a look at the new station seven Just seeing see some of the differences and some of the innovations with technology and just advances identifying what causes harm to firefighters just to take a walk through whenever you'd like to.

Tied in that is just an increase in ongoing expenses.

I know you're experiencing the same thing at the city. This is just a snapshot of some of the items.

We are trying to, our last IGA that was identified for us to fund more dispatchers to equal up the number of calls, and we are trying to get there. So that's one thing that we're going to continue to work on is fund seven of the fire dispatchers. And then our biggest thing is the capital. The fire apparatus continues to go up 10% to 15% every year, and just trying to keep pace with that has been difficult with the revenue that we've had coming in.

We just tried to find a way to do comparisons across the apartments on the northern Colorado and the front range

as far as a breakdown of number of citizens versus the budget.

One thing talking with Kelly she said it really shows that

PFA is a value I would agree. Yes, but we do have some room for improvement really identifying what our capital needs are

And just being able to maintain that 80 20 balance that we've had since this contracts been in place in 1981 And this is pretty incredible This agreement that we have we just want to make sure we maintain that equilibrium going forward

so the just wanted to touch on the district has been working um probably for the last five months of trying to address the tax caps have been placed on um they are going to be doing a

um evaluate a tabor ballot initiative for november to make sure that they keep at the 20 that they don't fall behind the ask the voters to remove that tax cap um so we're moving towards

the phases to get that messaged out and create education for the community and

part of the reason this is coming up here is that Poudre Fire Authority cannot raise funds we have to go to our parents so that's a Poudre Valley Fire Protection District in the city of Fort Collins so that's why we're bringing

this topic up here those are the two governing bodies and I said like I said

before the authority doesn't have any statutory rights to do any type of increase so and then met with Caleb again today and we continue to meet over combination combination

the council is consideration of voter approved sales tax measure in support of long-term service

and funding needs and then i'm happy to hear council feedback on service priorities other

funding options and then i just want to say i value your time i'm happy to come back to do a

work session if you feel that's necessary to answer more questions or provide more details

in depth of what the capital needs are of drilling down more on the details of that or anything else

that you'd like to great thank you chief thank you do council members have any questions or comments

Yeah, go ahead. Thank you so much for the presentation and thank you to you and your team for everything you do to keep our community safe. I want to note first of all that I think your acceptance rate is twice as competitive as Harvard's. I just looked up the acceptance rate of Harvard and you're really double that. So, twice as competitive you're half that. So the point about really sourcing people from the community, I think is one that we all appreciate. So thank you. I was really struck by the statistic in the presentation that I think 1.4 percent of your calls are actually fire. I mean, you do so many other things. So I think as a council, we also appreciate the preventative approach to public safety, and wanted to make sure if there are any takeaways that you have to offer that we can sort of help address through our other policies. Again, and the sort of intent of a work session being a bit collaborative, not to take a ton of time, But again, noticing that you're doing a lot and how can we, through other policies, even Division Zero is one.

So any ways that we can support some of these, you know, reducing some of these calls?

Sure. No, I appreciate that question.

I think one of the things like you and I talked about when you and I met being from the codes, that typically when codes get in place, something bad has happened. So they're the correct death or serious injury. And I think for us to have that collaborative approach as we enter into, especially the strategic initiatives of the city council, how can we streamline that process? And my personal philosophy is that we want businesses to come here. And Fort Collins is the center of our entire response area for commercial and a lot of the multifamily housing. So how can we work together, you know, to ease that process and to really have a one-stop shop? So anybody who comes to the city of Fort Collins to build that they don't even know this pooter fire authority in city for counts That we're all working seamlessly I think you know some of the things explored with a couple of the board members when we talked when you first came on I think that that's a big thing for the development because you've all heard it I've heard it that it's painful to go through the process in Fort Collins to build or to do additions And how do we make that easier? Because they pay a fee and we should be providing a great service that they should walk away from that and thinking like this was great

And you're already doing a lot of the efforts on the preventative side We partner with so many of the Fort Collins departments when we do our outreach and education when we need assistance through other departments We already work with the Fort Collins Police Department the utilities out of our training center So so many things and then the work that we do in the Fort Collins 911 Center would not be possible without the collaboration there too

But really focus on that community health piece Like you said, that's a majority of the calls that we get and one thing that we're going to start here and coming up in May is Education on the wildland urban interface even for in the city of Fort Collins because everyone's very concerned about the drought and the other

Conditions and just that fire we had on Willicks and also the sterile fire that was very close to Port Collins

And it's been the first time in a long time to have evacuations And things be implemented so it really got people's attention So how can we as an organization capitalize on people's attention to that? How do you make your space defensible? What are some common sense things? I think that's one thing that we're really going to focus our time and effort on the first half of this summer

Thank you.

Other compliments? Yeah, Melanie. Thank you, and thanks for the presentation. Also, I thought your annual report was great. I enjoyed that it had so many pictures and also graphs. I like the visuals. So my question is, with the percentage of calls that are medical, what percentage of the medical calls are you responding with a full fire apparatus versus a different kind of vehicle? Because I'm thinking about the wear and tear. It looked like an engine's like close to $2 million.

No, so we just implemented last year that we took our – so let me back up. Medical calls are broken down in six categories. It goes Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, and Omega. So Alpha calls was about 3,500 calls for service. We worked with UC Health and did an evaluation about a six- to nine-month period of having the right size response. Do both UC Health and Pooder Fire have to go to Alpha calls? and we identified looking at outcomes of when they got to the ER, did they get admitted, what kind of conditions, was it truly diagnosed, the information they gave 911, is that we didn't need to send two units. So right now we did a transition where we only send UC Health on those calls, and if no UC Health unit available, we will go. But that reduced our call volume by about 3,500, which was a tremendous impact on our apparatus. And not only that, but really impacts that they're truly available for a real emergency. So if one of those Delta or Echo calls, someone quits breathing or their heart stops, that they're available to those calls. Or if a fire comes in, now we have more resources available. So that's some of the things that we're doing. That's an ongoing project that we continue to evaluate all of our calls. And that's part of the accreditation piece is what we call program evaluation. Are all the way we deliver our responses? And we also looked at every type of response last year for fire calls, rope rescue, water rescue. Are we sending the right amount of resources to mitigate that? Do we have too many, too little? So we look at that on a regular basis and evaluate all the calls that we've gone on.

Okay, I appreciate that because I think you pointed this out. The city organization also is just noticing that our equipment is becoming so expensive. So I'm thinking about how can we maintain that equipment for a longer amount of time, use it for the right purposes, and not put the wear and tear on vehicles when it's overkill. Yes. So I appreciate that.

And that community health program really prevents calls also, not even from getting into the 911 center.

they're going proactively preventing them from calling and i'm assuming and i know that the biggest cost is not apparatus but i'm assuming the chp is responding in a different kind of vehicle than yeah just regular sedan so okay perfect thanks other council members yeah chris

um yeah thanks so much for the presentation and for all the work you guys do um just incredible

to see all that stuff i can't wait to go to that event you were talking about um yeah so i just wanted to follow up on ann's comment and just um thank you for being flexible on some of the vision zero and like making growth affordable and sustainable goals that the council has set um like what kind of levers does pfa have do you think to help um like make streets safer make buildings more affordable things like that i think a lot of it that we still have

we still have a lot of things to explore and identify. So there's always, in the fire code, there's always alternative means and methods that we can come up with. And I think for us to be proactively working with the city building department

of like what still meets our need, we don't want to do anything that impacts safety of our citizens, but how can we, like you said, make it more easier, make it more affordable, more streamlined

for the customer and citizens that live here. So I think there's a lot of ways, like we've talked about internally, but it's partnering with the building department of how we can do that together and create one approach for everything.

Mostly I just want to commend you guys for being so forward-thinking on this kind of stuff

and looking at the bigger picture in terms of road deaths

and as we look at street standard changes and building code changes and stuff. I guess for me in terms of the future work session stuff, I think if we're going to look into this tax change in some way, I would love to dig a little deeper into the capital plans you guys have,

but some of the other financial information that would be helpful for me, I guess.

No, we'd appreciate the opportunity for that. Thank you.

But that's it. I just, thank you.

I don't have any specific codes to give you right now. Other council members? Yeah, Josh.

Thank you. I'll echo the comments. It's a great presentation. I really like the story of the individual who was calling 911 every day to get out of their chair. And this community health program helped that person out, met their needs without, you know, constantly sending crews and things like that. So that's a great example of reducing costs and improving service. I'm just curious when it comes to 911 or dispatch, have you explored or are there opportunities to try to share that service with other agencies here in the county or in the area? to maybe get some economies of scale or partnerships? Sure.

So within our IGA and the work that we do, Fort Collins 911, those costs are identified based on call volume and usage. So UC Health pays a pretty significant portion, and so does PFA. They also dispatch Wellington, and then that's the major agencies that they dispatch other than Fort Collins Police Department. And I'm sure Caleb can touch on that. Those are broken out as far as our usage, maintenance, and everything else. the fees as far as a percentage that we pay for those services and the personnel that provide those

thank you and then with your capital funding um looking at the budget and and how how resources go into your capital fund is there a consistent policy of the share of revenues that that are set aside for capital or or is it kind of a whatever's left over of the contributions between

the fire authority and the city get deposited that makes sense yes no it does so we we have

been moving towards a policy of having a four percent for all of our value of all of our buildings for capital improvement and we have a fund i think we're at 3.2 or 3.3 and i can get you the exact number so um and then we also have funds set aside for apparatus another thing in addition to that if we have any underspend for the year that automatically goes to capital that's a board policy that we have that they want that to go not for ongoing expenses but it goes in to fund the apparatus and the facilities and up until this year we have been pay as you go and we just can't keep pace with the cost of building construction apparatus so this will be the first time we'll

have to take a loan out for station five so and then i said one other question um and you touched on them a little bit but i've seen comments even about your drone program um social media and what have you and sort of the argument over surveillance and things like that but um first of all just i assume i'm correct that your drones are only dispatched when there's actually a call that goes to that location correct and the value of that is you're more readily able to determine

which resources to send you may end up sending less than you would without the drone information you may send more and be more prepared for for whatever you're facing so can you just expand on

that a little bit? Sure. No, we only send it on calls that we're responding to. So it's just a couple is that fire we had on Willis Lane. It was on scene before our units were there. So we identified what the risks were and what are the resources and where we needed them to go because it gives you a great layout of what area to approach from. We also, two weeks for that, we had a house fire. It came in as a house fire and ended up being a leaf pile. So they saw that and that's an opportunity for us to downgrade that response because our most dangerous thing is going to call is lights and sirens so that's a one engine response versus four engines to support vehicles a battalion chief and an ambulance so and then we have been using it for some of our safety too we get called sometimes to encampments we've gone out at night the drone will come over top and it can identify as a thermal piece so it shows where all the people are and we can find the fire versus trying to walk around and search it out so it makes best use for our time and ours is once it's on scene provides a situational awareness it responds back to the base yeah it's not doing any surveillance and I've had some good conversation I think one of Ann's constituents we had a good conversation last week about it and just answering the questions because then be and I love that people want to know the answers and we're still working through the process too because it's new technology and find out ways to use it to keep our members safe in the community awesome thank you I think it's valuable

if we want to consider asking the taxpayers for more resources to to point out those efficiencies and those cost savings and those those great programs you should have so thank you I appreciate it no thank you yeah Amy

thank you and thank you chief for all the work that you and your team do and it's just really appreciated it's the PFA has a amazing reputation in our community and thanks for being a good steward of it my question kind of dovetails on council member fudge is the drone program a part of your accreditation in the programs that you were listing it is not because we just

started it but I also am on the board of directors for Center for Public Safety Excellence and that's gonna be one of the programs that we're gonna be having departments that have them that have to meet certain criteria for the drone program and how do you measure that so it's not part of the accreditation process but we have the same procedures that we use for all of our programs of how we evaluate make sure that they're meeting our needs so we do a program evaluation on everything that we do. So it will be part of that process going forward.

Okay, great. Thank you. Thank you. And can you elaborate a little bit more on the property and liability insurance? That is a significant increase and I'm expecting it's not going to go

down. It is not. That's continued by an increased every year on annual basis. That's one of our

fixed expenses that we don't have any control over. And what all is entailed in that, the liability piece? I'm just... I think Patty's behind me. Yeah, I'm just curious because it seems like

it would encompass I'm gonna ask a friend okay thank you for the question I

think that the significant increase that happened with that year was the cost of replacement when we did an evaluation of our 120 million dollars of facilities we realized that we were underinsured so we had to bump that up for our replacement cost. Thank you. That's helpful.

able to provide us service question yeah just on the district side the legislation and there's also and I think you just had your legislative review last we checked last week there's ten items to property tax limits on so depending what happens in this legislative session on the district side there's quite a few the nice thing before counts your home rule so you're

not impacted by that okay thank you thank you thank you Julie thanks I just I had a couple questions both sorry the drone program do you have specific drone pilots or do you train

already staff that you already have so we already had drone pilots these drones have faa waivers that our 911 staff can fly them um they're main they have to maintain 200 feet and then there's some other parameters that's already programmed into the drone so once it launches automatically, it flies autonomous there. And once on scene, the 911 dispatcher will take over and maneuver to get us a better vantage point. Or we have our own drone pilots that can take control through a connection on that to do that. Same with police help us out. So there's multiple layers to it. So it's not one group of people. There's many people that can fly these.

Okay, great. Thank you. And then I'm glad Josh mentioned economies of scale. It's just something that occurred to me as well in looking at the fire service value comparisons. Do you think that fits in to what we're seeing here? Is that because we, I mean, we're not, I mean, Thornton's not that far behind us, but we are the largest municipality shown there, that we are experiencing the economy of scale in that case?

I think we are experiencing, when talking with some of those other departments, just as far as capital and some of the things able to do, that we are a little restricted as far as that goes, Especially having the large population and square mile base that we have to cover

Okay, great. Thank you so much. No. Thank you for the questions

Any other questions? Okay, I have questions about drones and they're all answered. So nice excellent. Well, thank you for coming tonight And thank you for your partnership. We always enjoy the annual report

No, and I forgot to mention that Julie and Melanie are on our board. So appreciate their service and Kelly also so Thank you, and thanks for letting us be here tonight. Great. Thank you

All right, move on to our next item. Yes. Again, thank you to all of the PFA team who is here. We will go ahead and invite our district attorney up to the table.

Again, this is another opportunity to do an annual report,

and I've been doing this for a few years now to really understand some of the work that's happening out of our district attorney's office.

So, Gordon, thank you for being here.

you would think i could figure that out on my own josh but thank you um thank you for having me here tonight i know it's a packed agenda so i'm probably gonna move quick um to respect all your time um but for those that are new on the board um you know we

get around to all of our town councils and boards throughout larrimer and jackson county to give an update in what we do. Obviously, you know, we don't report or are funded by any of the boards or councils, but we prosecute most of the crime going on in those communities. And there's a few communities like yourselves in Loveland that have municipal court systems, obviously, but nevertheless, the vast majority of crime is getting prosecuted through the district attorney's office and all of the serious crime is being prosecuted through the district attorney's office. We want to share what we're doing, what we're working on, answer questions, and make sure we're being accountable to all of our various constituencies. The great part about not being funded by you is I don't ask for money at the end of these presentations. You don't have to worry about that. So it's just a nice

update on what we're doing. So who we are and what we do, as I said, we're responsible for prosecuting

all crime in Larimer and Jackson County. But the way we do that is really important. And what our goal is, we are trying to treat crimes at the appropriate level they come in at. And that means that the majority of cases that we prosecute, and on a couple slides you'll see is about 15,000 cases a year, the majority of those are Lor level crimes, folks without criminal histories, folks who have made a mistake and who are much benefited by addressing those root causes of crime, sending them back out of the system better than they came in to be contributing members of our community. Obviously, in some cases, and I'll update you on some of the more serious Fort Collins cases, that's a smaller percentage of what we do, but a really, really important part of what we do to make sure that we're keeping the community safe. And obviously in those we're looking for much more significant types of resolutions. Just for folks that don't know, so we are the 8th Judicial District. We're all Larimer and Jackson County. Obviously Jackson County is a very, very small percentage of our population, but one of our two counties. And we're funded almost entirely by the boards of those two counties with the exception of some grant funding. This is a breakdown of what our total 8th Judicial District caseload looks like. As you can see, this goes back to about 2020. Most case categories have been pretty consistent over that period of time. That top line that you see that has gone up is traffic cases. There's sort of two reasons. One is we started coding all traffic cases that came into our office that did not used to happen for the things that were resolved on day one. Those never even got added. But we've also seen sort of an uptick in traffic cases throughout many of our jurisdictions over this period of years just in terms of what local enforcement priorities look like.

Just some stats that are sort of relevant to sort of some of the scope of what we do,

because we do more than just prosecute cases. One thing we do is give out crime victims compensation. That 2024 number is the last number we had, though I think we just got the update today on 2025. You can see that's a big number, 2024, $700,000. We went back to try to make victims whole in really sort of moments of their greatest stress and trauma and needs in their lives. since that's a really important program that's administered through our office. We found out today that our 2025 number, we gave out more crime victims compensation in the 8th JD than the entire state of Kansas. And that's because we prioritize that and realize that that's just a really important part of supporting folks as they go through the criminal justice process.

We served about 5,500 different victims in 2025.

And so that's across all categories of cases, from misdemeanors all the way up to homicide cases. every victim of course experiencing something significant in their lives and so we have a really robust victim witness department who do nothing but support victims and educate them through what is a really difficult system folks do not like meeting me in my professional life usually means you're a victim of a crime or a defendant in a case it's not a fun time to have to learn about the criminal justice system and our victim witness department is really great in that regard and we have both juvenile and adult diversion programs. That's one of the great ways that we can divert folks out of the traditional criminal justice process, make sure we're addressing those underlying causes of crime, benefiting them and benefiting the community at the same time, while also sort of reducing some of the more time-intensive, resource-intensive caseload. Those have both had really high success rates over the years. We also now manage a lot of data, unfortunately. That's not a fun part of the job, but it's a reality. As you all are aware from your local agency, the increase in body-worn cameras and media is just through the roof. We just even got some updated numbers from the first quarter of 2026 from my records management team, and it is still growing exponentially. It's absolutely uncontrollable, and we're trying to work with all our agencies to make sure that that is getting from them to us and then to defense attorneys in appropriate time frames, but it's becoming very difficult, even though those tools are really helpful. Body-worn cameras are great tools. cell phone downloads that Fort Collins Police, for instance, is doing all the time. They help our cases, but it's also a lot for them and for us to manage. Life of a case, I don't go through

all this at these presentations because it would take too long, but I put that up there only to

show there's a lot that goes on behind the scenes. And so the criminal justice process does flow very slowly, and that's very understandably frustrating for victims, defendants, the community thinking, and what the heck is going on with XYZ case. Folks behind the scenes in our office are working really hard litigating those issues, and there's a lot that goes into getting a case to resolution or trial, and even beyond to appeal.

Some of the current things we're working on, you probably heard last year

we launched a domestic violence unit for the first time in our office's history. That unit has a prosecutor, a victim advocate, and an investigator, and working on high-risk cases. That unit has now sort of hit its stride and has really achieved a lot of great results on really complex cases where you need more support and more hands-on work with law enforcement agencies, with victims, with trial preparation to make sure that we can get successful results in those cases. We're also always working on stuff at the Capitol. A lot of you, I know, are very in tune to that, so I won't belabor some of these points. But one of the things that is significant, I think, for folks in the community to know is that statewide we're working on reducing the backlog in SANE kits, which are sexual assault kits. That deters people from wanting to report some of those crimes when they heard some of this news that those backlogs are so big. We, of course, don't want that. The state has worked to get those down. We've worked on some other issues as well. In careless driving, traffic fatalities and traffic injuries are up across the state. It's an incredibly difficult problem to solve. But one thing that was really troubling for us is that the Supreme Court a couple years ago, the Colorado Supreme Court had said we can only charge one count per incident. So we could have multiple deaths in multiple different vehicles and we could only charge one count. That was an incredible disservice to victims. So that was something I personally worked hard on with some others last year to get changed. Some of the big things on the docket at the Capitol for us this year, the biggest thing probably is the competency fix bill. There are gaps in our competency system in Colorado where there are folks who may be dangerous to the community, but that criminal case cannot proceed due to those mental health concerns. And what happens to that person? It's

really complex and it's really difficult. I'll tell you that bill is about 300 pages that got introduced at the Capitol, so I'm not going to pretend to present on that. But we're working on

some sort of broader initiatives that are going to fill some holes in our criminal justice and community safety apparatus. We launched our Veterans Court last year along with a lot of other stakeholders in the criminal justice system that is specifically designed to serve those that have served our country and the military and have often sort of co-occurring needs that brought them into the criminal justice system to try to honor their service and provide rehabilitation in a way that's going to be effective. The program has been really great so far with participants being able to coalesce around common experiences and understandings, support each other, and come out of that criminal justice system with those supports in place to be successful members of our community. Our bias and hate-motivated crime hotline is something we're really trying to advertise around the community over the last couple months. We just launched that this spring. We'd heard growing concern over the last couple of years from different vulnerable communities

in Larimer County that they didn't know where to turn, that they were afraid of calling specific

people. And we want those cases to be reported, right? Just like domestic violence or sexual assault, we know that hate crimes are an underreported crime because people don't know whether law enforcement care or whether prosecutors would do anything. And that's not a knock in any of our law enforcement agencies in Larimer County, but it's a reality of the fact that trust exists in different places. And if we can build an additional avenue to try to earn trust and to try to reach people, that's a positive step. And so we want folks in the community to know that law enforcement will respond to these. We will prosecute these. We take these really seriously. And so we provided this additional resource. Certainly this year, over the last year or so, one of the big things that prompted it is hearing from folks in our immigrant communities that they they don't know who's going to show up at their door they don't know what local law enforcement does and doesn't do they don't know who might be federal law enforcement who might be local law enforcement and so this is an opportunity to try to provide that additional hand for them to

reach out to um a couple cases of note um to update um the council on that are some sort of

high-profile serious cases that we do take questions on from time to time.

The first case on the left there, and I should say before I talk about any of these, these are all open cases, so I'm limited in the facts I can share. All these folks are innocent until proven guilty. These are allegations, but they're currently in the system, and so I do want to provide some updates. Bondrescu is a case, a very troubling case where the allegation is kidnapping, moving victim across state lines and really holding her in an untenable situation here in Fort Collins. Fort Collins Police did a great job in the investigation of that case. That is a case that

is currently in our competency court. That's a common reason you'll hear why some of these cases are still in the process. Competency, as I said, is a really difficult issue in Colorado. One of

the problems we face is there is an enormous backlog at the state hospital. So often in these cases, everyone locally, prosecution, defense, judges are all just waiting for this competency

process to play out. That's the situation of that case. Ethan Campbell is a case that was a

long-running investigation into a home invasion. Our office worked hand-in-hand with Fort Collins Police for well over a year to try to solve this case. Eventually, an arrest was made,

so we're very appreciative of the partnership in that case. That case was just in court today and got set out a few weeks, but we are hoping to make progress on that case in the near future.

Andrew Cerrone is a Fort Collins police officer who was recently arrested that I certainly know

had some publicity. That case is just in the initial steps and is coming back in April 16th,

but is certainly high on our radar. Brian Gallegos is the defendant in the murder that occurred at the Foothills Mall in the double homicide. I know given sort of the public nature of that that was really troubling to a lot of folks in our community. Mr. Agagos was a juvenile at the time of the commission of that crime. Very rarely in the district attorney's office do we charge a juvenile in adult court. I think it has to be a rare, rare, rare exception, understanding the development of juvenile brains, understanding that we want to treat juveniles as juveniles whenever possible. On incredibly serious crimes with incredibly horrific results. The tools in the juvenile system

this case. There's going to be what we call a reverse transfer hearing, which is a hearing where a judge determines whether we are able to continue prosecuting in adult court, and that

court case is happening, excuse me, hearing in June. I should have mentioned that that was the

same hearing listed on that Ethan Campbell case. We also proceeded on Mr. Campbell in adult court,

even though that was committed as a juvenile. The Talon Grays case is a homicide that occurred here in Old Town a couple years ago. The case has been set for trial a couple times

and has just been reset for trial in August, so that is a case we expect to take to trial and see a result this summer.

Brody Hill is a homicide that occurred in South Fort Collins just before the end of last calendar year.

That case is in its pretty early stages. The reality is that the more serious the case, the longer that's going to take to get through the criminal justice system. A homicide case is going to have really serious and extensive litigation, both from the prosecution and the defense, and so they do take a bit of time to get to trial. The same is true with the Adrian Pacheco case. That's a case that currently has some litigation up at the Colorado Court of Appeals, and so

we're waiting in the Court of Appeals to make some decisions so we can proceed on that matter.

And the Pasolo case is a case involving a Poudre school teacher that, again, I know has certainly created a lot of questions for us in the community. that case is again proceeding appropriately but slowly just given the

nature of the severity of the offenses and the last case is the most recent homicide in Fort Collins that occurred down near King Soopers there are three co-defendants in that case I'm charged with sort of various different levels of

homicide that case again very new so just at its early stages in our office

Lastly, some stats. Often councils are asking me, well, okay, here's what your 8th JD stats look like. How does that compare to our local jurisdiction? So these are just graphs broken down in the left with all of our 8th Judicial District caseload and on the right what Fort Collins looks like. I know you all get a lot of stats from Fort Collins PD and of course get a lot of updates from them. So I don't sort of go into those as much detail here.

Essentially, it looks very similar in terms of the caseload. The main difference there is the traffic is quite a bit Lor in Fort Collins. I think the reason for that is because some of your

traffic cases are handled at your municipal court level and a lot of other agencies don't have that avenue. So all their traffic cases, for instance, come to us at the district attorney's office.

The final slide here is just what our sentencing looks like. I remind folks that we have a data dashboard on our district attorney website. If you just go to our website and click on our stats tab,

there's a whole host of data that we share publicly, as much or more data than essentially any DA's office in the country. So folks can really scroll through a lot. But sentencing is one of those things that folks do want to look at. Essentially what this shows for felonies and misdemeanors is that we are reserving jail and incarceration for folks that truly deserve and need jail and incarceration. The majority of our sentences are probationary, rehabilitative oriented sentences. And when we can seek those, we do. Most of the cases I just updated you

on because those are the cases that get community questions are serious cases which we don't.

And those would be the types of cases reflected in those Department of Corrections sentences.

Lastly, this is just how folks get a hold of us. I know folks on council have heard me say this, but for new folks, we want to be available. We want to answer questions. We want folks to understand the system.

I'm aware of how sort of opaque the criminal justice system can be. And so certainly we want to be responsive, want folks to understand and answer questions.

I know the fire chief offered a tour of the fire stations. My tour would not be as exciting. I don't have a lot of fun toys to show off. That being said, folks are always welcome.

If you want to come say hi to our office, check out what we're doing, come up to court.

We would love to have you. And with that, I'm happy to take questions.

Great. Thank you. Thanks for the presentation and your service and your office. Do council members have any questions or comments? All right, we'll go to Melanie and then Chris.

Okay, and this may not even be a question that you can answer, but thank you so much for this. You packed a lot of information into a short period of time, and I know how busy things are at the court. I'm interested in the competency bill. are there any highlights you could share because that's been an issue that's come up with high schoolers that we've worked with with mental health issues and you know whether or not people can be involved do you have any high points of what changes might be helpful yeah so where the

gap is is when someone is found incompetent to proceed permanently incompetent to proceed that means we cannot prosecute them right it would be unconstitutional to prosecute someone that cannot

understand the proceedings of the case. Our competency docket, and we are one of the first judicial district in the state to develop a competency docket, has been really successful

for 99% of people to either restore them the competency, and we proceed prosecuting the case, or perhaps they can't be restored, but it's a pretty low-level case, and their best bet is to access community resources that we've now established for them through the competency docket. And really, it's not necessary or appropriate to proceed through the criminal

process. There's a really, really, really narrow, but really important subset of cases that are those folks that are incompetent, but really dangerous to the community. The civil commitment burden in Colorado is incredibly high, and it essentially can almost never be met. And so we can make those arguments that this person is dangerous till the cows come home. The standard is not there. It's not really the judge's fault. It's how our laws are written.

You know, there was a case out of Weld County that got a lot of publicity with a similar defendant that we dealt with, where that person presented an obvious danger, was going around communities with loaded automatic firearms, and kept getting kicked back out of the criminal justice system because they were permanently incompetent, but did not meet the standard of presenting an imminent danger because once they were in the system, they were supervised and medicated and didn't present that danger.

Then they left the system, became unmedicated and unsupervised, presented the new danger. So that's a really, really small subset of folks, but a subset we need an opportunity to deal with.

And so one thing the bill does, the most important thing, is to try to fill that gap by rewriting that standard to give judges more leeway in making those civil commitments when the criminal justice system has run its course.

and also gives DA's offices some ability to be the advocates in those civil commitments. Because, right, we can't operate in the civil realm. I'm a criminal attorney. That's my authority. But we often know the facts by that point. We've been handling that case by that point through the competency process for a year, two years, maybe longer. And so to give us the ability to say, let's not pass it off to someone else. Let's make that argument to the judge that this person needs a stricter form of supervision.

That was really helpful. Thanks.

Yep.

Yeah, one of the things we're discussing here at the Council, you know, in the past

and then in the coming months is the use of ALPR cameras.

I'm just wondering about their impacts from your office's perspective on public safety.

Yeah, thank you for that question. I would say two really important parts of LPRs. The first is I very much understand and agree with folks in communities around Colorado

wanting transparency and wanting appropriate restrictions and safety guards in place about collection of data and with whom we're sharing that data right and we sort of talked about

federal authorities a little bit in terms of a bias motivated crime hotline um obviously i understand when we're talking about sharing with different federal agencies that causes people a lot of concern fears about federal enforcement in our community have not made us safer over the last

year they've made us less safe with deterring people from wanting to report hate crimes or domestic violence or whatever else so those concerns are very understandable and I think that's a really healthy conversation so everyone understands the parameters of what's going on in our communities the second

thing I would say is do LPRs help us solve serious crimes absolutely they do we have solved specifically in Larimer County within the last couple years at least two homicide cases because of LPRs that would not have been solved without that information. And so most cases, of course, that's not coming into play. But when we're talking about our ability to get justice for a victim on a homicide, our ability to hold a homicide defendant

accountable versus not versus that person still being out in the community, that is a huge

setback for community safety if we don't have access to the information that those provide in certain cases. And so from a community safety standpoint, I would certainly have a lot of concerns about LPRs not being available to law enforcement investigations. But again, that's

separate from saying how, when, why are we using these, who are we sharing these with, what providers are we using. Those are all sort of different parts of how we get to the right result of making sure we have the right law enforcement tools.

Well, I appreciate that. I think it would be helpful if we could coordinate as we go forward and we get options about

certain kinds of limitations on these cameras, whether we want to keep them. We haven't made a decision whether we want to keep them or not or what kinds of limitations

we would maybe want to have around them given privacy concerns.

And so, the more we can collaborate, the better just in terms of what makes sense in terms

of like how long to keep the data stuff like that.

One of my questions is how do you guys coordinate with local police like like for Collins police

around prosecutor prosecutorial priorities?

How do you communicate that to the police department and how does that?

Yeah, I guess that's a question.

Yeah, so I meet with all of the law enforcement chiefs at the judicial district at least once a month. we have a standing monthly meeting um but usually i'm in contact with a lot of them especially from our bigger agencies much more frequently than that we also of course have a lot of communication at you know Lor levels of of our leadership teams both with fort collins and and my office in the end it you know we serve different roles right and so law enforcement are going to investigate and charge the crimes that they feel are appropriate and then it's our decision how to proceed with those. And so we don't tell law enforcement, you know, don't investigate this or do investigate that. We need to stay in our lane, which is making the prosecution decisions once those cases come to our office, which we have the discretion to do everything from dismiss a case to, you know, seek a maximum sentence on that case and everything between like a lot of those, you know, diversionary opportunities that I discussed in the presentation. Certainly, it benefits everyone to be collaborating and to be on the same page. And so often that necessitates conversations about, you know, did one of us miss the mark and how do we get back on that same page? But that's sort of just an ever-evolving conversation. You know, we don't have, like, a priority list that we send to law enforcement or anything like that.

And do you feel like there's opportunities to improve the kind of, like, areas of priority? or do you feel like you have you both are on a pretty good have a pretty good like sense of where things should go in terms of improving public safety um i think everyone always has areas to

improve right i mean the da's office has areas to improve so i i wouldn't be able to tell you anyone doesn't um and communication is always paramount right and so i you know i think you can probably never um under communicate right or never over communicate excuse me i mean i'll give you an example. Just last night, I was at CSU on a panel actually with Assistant Chief Barrett who's sitting behind me. And when I walked in, I said, haven't seen you in a long time. We're spending most of our evenings together this week, I guess, because we were both presenting to a segment of the community that was really concerned about a case where someone had been shooting a BB gun at some vehicles in sort of near Old Town. And there was a lot of community concern. And so we joined with Fort Collins as well as their CSU partners to provide some answers to the community let them understand hey what does that law enforcement investigation process look like what is the prosecution process look like make sure everyone's on the same page and communicate about that and I think you know there's always lessons learned from from that type of conversation all right

thanks so much other council members have questions comments Amy thank you very much and thank you very much for all of your hard work and just the longevity and consistency that you've always demonstrated with members of our immigrant community you have always been very transparent and very available and during this particular time in our life i just want to make sure that i extend my gratitude to you and i just appreciate everything that you're doing and the dashboard specifically has been really a remarkable tool so thank you for thinking ahead of the game and I just really appreciate all that you do well thank

you so much anyone else okay oh man go ahead just the smallest comment um first of all as one of the newer council members thank you for this overview it was really helpful and the the ECC and the resident that lives across from the ECC is in my district so I got a lot of communication from constituents that were concerned about that.

I did not realize that you were at the presentation last night. So I appreciate you dedicating some time to answering those questions. I know that means a lot to the community.

Yeah. So like I said earlier, I mean even though I know this from being a career prosecutor and being in this current role a long time, I still learn every day that folks don't understand why law enforcement does what they do, why prosecutors do what they do. And so I definitely believe the more communication, the better. We're often limited, and we're limited a little bit last night in terms of what we can share about an open case, because we have ethical obligations about what we're publicizing in the community and need to protect our ability to successfully prosecute that case. But we tried to share as much as we could, and I think it was a good conversation. Great, thank you.

Anyone else?

Okay, same then. Thank you so much.

Okay.

our staff presentation here and we'll take away that name tag we were not

gonna have Caleb serve as a district attorney anytime soon but we are going

to shift to talking about our enterprise resource planning program and have a

team up here from HR IT and finance so I think Caleb is going to kick us off

Thank you, Kelly. And I've done enough graduate school in my life, so I don't see a Jewish doctorate any time in my future.

So thank you, Mayor, Councilmembers, for having us tonight.

Our goal with tonight's briefing is just to give you a grounding on what the Enterprise Resource Planning or ERP project is.

As Kelly's recommended budget, which you'll see later this year, will contain a number of appropriation recommendations to be able to make significant progress on this project.

So this is just an overview of what an ERP system is.

So Fort Collins, like any other large organization, we rely on a core system to be able to manage our finances, pay our employees, and be that backbone of our financial and human capital operations.

So this is what is known as an enterprise resource planning software, ERP, and it is that kind of central point to bring together a lot of these core organizational processes and resources. So the current state is we are on a 27-year-old legacy ERP platform

uh jd edwards jde as it's known commonly around the city it's currently owned by oracle and it does run our payroll finance purchasing human resources because it's such an old system we have a lot of bolt-on separate systems to be able to accomplish the city's business so over 50

different applications that feed data into JDE in some manner. In addition to that, because the system is older, there are a lot of cumbersome and manual processes that staff currently works

through to be able to prosecute normal business. In addition to that, this is an on-premise system,

So there is limited ability for backup and disaster recovery.

And the highest risk is for our regular operations like payroll, which occurs every two weeks. If we were to have an issue with the system, it could be very disruptive to our organization very quickly. So for our future state, we want to move to a modern cloud-based solution that will provide us a lot more tools for automation efficiency, hopefully be able to significantly cut down on the number of separate applications that we need to run our businesses' processes, set us up for being able to better leverage artificial intelligence. Obviously, moving towards a cloud-based system gives us a lot more options for backup, disaster recovery, and modern security standards.

So this is just a snapshot of some numbers that were processed last year.

So you can see the amount of payroll that is processed through the system, vendor payments, how many staff are using the system, tax documents, those sorts of things.

And once again, this is just to give you a sense of the scale of our current system and its importance to our operations.

So these are the four key risks that we're currently focused on with the system. As JDE is an almost 30-year-old system, we are struggling with having appropriate vendor support,

particularly as this system is the talent pool that is able to service the system continues to shrink as people retire out of the workforce. We are anticipating having more and more trouble being able to maintain the system going forward. This is a 30-year-old system, so it is not up to current security and compliance standards. and there is a lot of operational fragility with both the manual processes that staff is doing and those 50 plus bolt-on systems feeding in that not only create inefficiency, but also create some risk in terms of something going wrong in the system or trouble with data that could take a lot of staff time to be able to unwind.

So this has been a known issue that the city has been working on for a number of years. We are not here tonight to just drop a problem in council's lap that we aren't already well aware of and are taking steps to plan for appropriately. So starting back in 2024, the city contracted with a firm called Barry Dunn to do some initial mapping of our current system in JDE and requirements gathering. In 2025, that work was expanded to really identify those 50-plus systems that currently feed into JDE. We hired a project manager for this last year as well. And then moving here into 2026, we have completed a robust budget and schedule analysis and are kicking off a partnership with the Government Finance Officers Association, or GFOA, to help us double check the requirements that we've put together and provide us some strategic advice through the procurement process and selection process of a vendor. Additionally, myself, Kevin, Teresa have been talking to a lot of colleagues up and down the front range. There are a number of cities that have gone through ERP upgrades recently. So we have been talking to our colleagues learning best practices and learning what pitfalls we want to avoid in our project. In addition, the city obviously is currently in the middle of a number of complex technology projects, and so we're taking lessons learned from those projects, both in terms of appropriate scoping, budgeting, timeline, and governance to make sure that this is a successful project. And then finally, starting back in 2022, reserves had been set aside to begin building the funding stack for this project.

So this is just a summary of the business case of why now. You know, and obviously the council's familiar that we are entering into a fairly tough budget season. And so, I think it is a fair question to ask why now is this a priority that we need to do?

So, in addition to some of the risks that I just talked about, I think one of the key things is every year that goes past that we don't address this project, that risk amount grows. I'm not going to sit here and say that our current system doesn't work because it does, but it is slow, manual, and inefficient.

And in addition, with some of the concerns that we have, particularly around disaster recovery, if we get in the mode where we have to replace JDE on a more expedited or emergency basis, it will likely be much more expensive and we will not be able to do nearly as good of a job with that project.

So despite some of the budget challenges that we know are coming this year, the staff team is planning to move forward with this project because of its importance for the organization.

So I mentioned earlier that this year in 2026, we've completed a deep dive of the budget estimates. So based on that, we're looking at an $18.1 million total cost for the project. Since we are still in the earlier stages and have not selected a vendor and are still doing some work with GFOA, as I mentioned earlier, we think that a reasonable range on that total project cost is between $16 to $20 million. You can see the various elements of that cost broken out here. One thing that I'll note is we're trying to set up the budget for this in a conservative manner, knowing that there are unknowns at this point.

So we have included $3.1 million of contingency in this estimate.

The other thing that we've included in the total $18.1 million estimate is existing staff in central services, so finance, HR, and IT, that are going to be dedicated to the project during the next few years.

AND SO THAT'S HOW WE GET TO THE TOTAL PROJECT COST OF 18.1 MILLION. BASED ON THAT $18.1 MILLION TOTAL PROJECT COST, WE'RE ANTICIPATING ABOUT 12.9 MILLION OF ADDITIONAL APPROPRIATION NEEDED

ABOVE AND BEYOND WHAT WE WOULD NORMALLY HAVE BUDGETED TO BE ABLE TO OPERATIONALIZE THIS PROJECT. AND AS I MENTIONED EARLIER, THIS IS PRIMARILY PLANNED OR STAFF IS PRIMARILY PLANNING THIS THROUGH They're recommending using one-time reserves in the 27 28 budget

So just to give a picture of of how we are looking at pulling together the funding stack for this project

I'll start at the bottom you can see there are currently there is currently

3.8 million dollars that has been set aside For this project and obviously 3.8 million dollars is not 12.9 million dollars. We recognize that Because this is a system that serves the entire city and it serves a number of our partner agencies such as PFA, we are looking at a funding model that has all portions of the city and any partners that want to participate in this project paying into it.

So I can say looking across all the funds in the city particularly in the utility funds And some of our other governmental funds I am feeling pretty confident at this point that our reserve picture and it is in a strong enough position

That there is funding available to be able to complete this project one of the advantages of Using those reserves as it is one-time money. So we do want to match that one-time Revenue up against a one-time expenditure with this project. So once again despite the constrained budget picture that we're

going into for the next two years we are feeling confident at the staff level that there is a very viable path to put the funding stack together for this project.

In the last slide that I'm trying to go to real quick is just a overview of the project timeline. So you can see this is broken up by what's going to be occurring in each of the years.

So here in 2026, we're working on finalizing our solicitation process and then moving into the second half of this year,

doing a solicitation process, interviewing potential implementers, demoing softwares, and making a decision on what platform we'll go with.

Our plan is to award the contract for an implementer and solution provider in early 2027 to align with the availability of budget resources that would be appropriated in the next two-year budget.

That would potentially put us on track for a go-live in the third quarter of 2028. there's still a lot operationally staff is working through what that that will have to once we have an implementer on board figure out our exact timing for example would we do the core finance at HR components all at once would we stagger that implementation there's there's some pros and cons to each of those approaches and then we would move into the post go live phase in 2029 and so once again this was intended to just be a introduction for council like I mentioned earlier there will be this will be part of the budget proposal we just wanted to surface this early for you in case you have any questions at this point and are certainly happy to follow up for any questions as we go through later this year so thank you thank you do council members have any

questions or comments yeah Josh it's right up my alley right so Caleb we've talked a little bit in the finance committee as we've walked through some of the program budgets and getting more detail into those. And I remember you saying that the current system requires a lot of manual work and some guesswork to try to give council good information about what any individual program costs. Can you just kind of maybe expand on that for those who are not on

finance? Yeah, so because the system, so JDE currently runs what is known as our general ledger, which is kind of the map of all our financial accounts. Because that has been built kind of probably the best way to describe it in phases over the last 30 years, there is a good amount of variation between departments and service areas with exactly how things are budgeted. With the new ERP project, one of the best practices in talking with other communities that we plan to do is to redraw that chart of accounts, which is kind of the fundamental way that we account for all the public funds among all the various funds that the city has. And that will allow us to kind of put the entire city's financial picture on a consistent basis and be able to pull data in much more apples to apples ways across different parts of the city. That's probably the simplest explanation of it is going to be a highly complex and technical project. But ultimately.

on with our numbers. Thank you and I was really blown away in your presentation by the 30,000 plus hours that are spent on workarounds in the bolt-on systems. That's about 15 positions that we're spending doing that type of work. So at a time when we have some significant budget challenges,

I think implementing something like this to save that time and those resources is a great idea. I'm glad to hear that we're using GFOA. I work for an organization that used GFOA to replace its ERP system, and they really helped a lot. My final question is just, do you have any idea how much we spend annually on all those bolt-on programs for the licenses and such that maybe we won't have to spend in future years?

Yeah, so we spend, and Kevin, correct me if I'm wrong, I think it's about $1.1, $1.2 million. $1.2 million. $1.2 million. One of the complexities that we still need to map as we get into this project is exactly what will the core portions of the ERP system be, and then what opportunities will we have post-go live to start sunsetting different modules. So it's hard to, at this point, commit to a specific savings target after go live.

And then the reality is the new system that we'll look at is going to be a software-as-a-service subscription. So that will be adding a new cost that I think in the best case scenario gets offset by the retirement of the legacy costs. Thank you.

Okay. Anytime I do the same math that Josh does, I feel really smart.

Because I also noted the 30,600 hours and the 15 almost, 14 and three quarters.

equivalency in FTE. And just to be clear, you think that you would gain that time back eventually?

So a couple answers to that. Ultimately, in a perfect future state, yes. Now, I will say those 30,000 hours are distributed across a number of different staff members. It's not like there's only 15 people doing that. It's baked into so many employees' daily work that they are having to export something out of the system, put it into an Excel spreadsheet, manipulate the data, do something else to be able to do whatever they need to for their business need. So one of the learnings, though, with an ERP project, and I want to be transparent with both the organization and council about this, is despite the fact that JDE is an old inefficient system, we as an organization are used to it. One of the learnings that we've heard from other communities is, there is going to be at least an initial drop in efficiency after you implement the new system as the employee base gets used to using it before you really start seeing those efficiency gains. In certainly looking out that far in the future, I probably don't see it as the likely scenario is not an ability to reduce headcount but hopefully to be able to defer the need for additional headcount because we'll

gain some efficiency in our system. Still how many employees does the city have like I mean if you're dividing that across is it like 2,000 ish right okay that's still almost it's a few days a year that everybody is wasting collectively so it would be nice to have that efficiency back eventually long-term perfect world um there's two other questions one would be i mean this is a very outdated system at this point right but it was new and shiny in what 1999 um so what is the planning and the budgeting really for the next cycle of this when whatever the system is is no longer meeting the city's needs and i know hopefully that's long-term and subscription services sort of take that guesswork out a little bit but um how can we i don't know what do you think from a financial perspective yeah is the best way to do this yeah so i'll

let kevin expand on this um but you know from a simple answer jde right now is a on-premise system that anytime that we need to make an upgrade to it or configuration change, that is programming work that either Kevin's staff is doing or we're having to contract for. With a more modern system that is a software as a service, the market is really moving more towards having that maintenance and configuration work being done by the vendor. So hopefully you have a product that is able to keep up more than the static system that we have now. But I'll let Kevin expand on that.

And well stated. I'd add to that. First, let's look at the security aspects. These vendors are best in class providing continuous upgrades and patches for security vulnerabilities. In our current system, we would have to either one go through a very arduous regression testing exercise each time we identify a new patch that could take us up to six months every time we want to do that. So we're getting those patches automatic. So everything's going to iteratively change. If I could use an analogy much like let's say vehicles. If we were to purchase a 1998 vehicle today, think of the safety standards, the security standards, but also the technology that's built in today. If any of you have cars that are getting automatic over-the-air patches or updates, it's occurring even without our engagement. That's where things are headed to prevent the stagnancy that can occur, but also the heavy lift every time we want to upgrade a version or upgrade to new features or even interface to other capabilities. These vendors provide those all out of the box. Because the other challenge we have is to, let's say we want to add a new budgeting platform in the future and we want to change our methodology. In today's time, we'd have to program all of that in. In tomorrow's, we would just, that vendor would just say, turn it on at no additional cost. So those are areas, not to mention the new AI emerging capabilities that are truly going to change the interaction and the engagement for all of the staff, vendors, and teams managing these platforms. They won't go through the same sequential workflows that we think of today. that will also evolve very quickly and that's something we could never staff

for all right so just that I'm clear basically I'm trying to get to the point of do we need to budget for additional like replacement down the line at all or is it appropriate just to say okay we'll pay for it out of the general fund and other reserves when it gets to it like so the main cost going forward would be

that annual software subscription. And there may be some specific targeted projects and upgrades that could require additional funding in the future. But if the question is, do we need to start setting aside money for another $18 million project sometime in the future, the answer would be no, not with the type of software we're looking at moving to. Okay. That is helpful.

and then the last thing through your presentation and my review of it beforehand I'm very aware of the risks that are involved with this extremely outdated surface and you're still planning on going live in two years is that soon enough? I understand the constraints of budget systems but that's scary to hear that this really doesn't work and if this fails like I can't think of like a non-swear word to use. So just fill it in. So once again, the current

system is stable and it works. There are significant risks around it, which I outlined. I will say the back half of 2028 go live date is probably about as reasonably aggressive as we can be at this point. These are very large transformational projects. We've done a lot of planning work. The amount of staff that are going to have to be pulled off of their day job, so I'll just take one example. The payroll manager is probably going to have to be pulled off of their day job for a year to 18 months, which then means we have to train replacement staff, which is part of the the project budget to come in and fill the payroll manager's day job while they get detailed to the ERP project to make sure the new system gets payroll configured correctly. Multiply that across probably 30 critical lines of business. This is about as aggressive of a timeline as we think we can look at at this point to do the implementation in a correct manner.

Okay. So I'm basically asking to do donuts with an oil tanker or something, right? Like it's steering a ship? Yes. And it takes some time. Okay. I just wanted to check in to make sure that, I mean, I understand that's stable, but.

And I want to add two points to that. One, in the discovery work we've done by establishing a lot of community partnerships with up and down the front range, we have a lot of stories to tell around where others really tried to accelerate and didn't address some of the foundational chart of accounts. really looking at process, looking at all the workflows, how to really improve those instead of just really lifting and shifting to a new platform. Some of them actually have this, they failed and started over. So, and other to what we've seen in other communities, I really, really recognize the transparency that the team has put forth in a lot of this in capturing all costs. Because a lot of other communities just talk about here's the license costs or here's the implementation costs. we've gone through forensically and looked at every potential cost to be conservative, but also to really plan for contingency because a lot of these ERP projects can fail if you don't do the foundational work the right way. The other thing to Kayla's point, we have put a lot of layers of protection and extra monitoring and response around ensuring that data is protected both when it's being stored as well as when it's being shared. So we still feel comfortable, but it does require a lot of extra effort to continue to maintain that. And one of the concerns that we continue to see is cyber threats are going to continue to increase. And we have to really continue our investments and our protection, even despite when we go to a new platform. We're still going to have to be very diligent about that. Absolutely.

Okay, well, you have really made the case for the need for it and the logic and planning behind the implementation. So thank you for taking the time to answer my questions

Any other councilman Melanie and then Julie Thank you and thanks for the presentation and I just wanted some clarification on slide On slide eight I believe where you have the funding stack kind of laid out with both our reserves and also some of our partner groups PFA Puder River Library District, EDA, and the MPO. And you may have said this, but could you clarify again for me what involvement we would expect from those partner agencies? Because we just had the presentation about PFA's got a tight budget.

Yeah. So, you know, we're still working through the exact model for what each agency's contribution would look like. The first fundamental question is you know does this agency want to continue to participate in the city with an ERP system or do they they want to go their own way? I'll say specifically in the case of PFA We've been having this conversation with them for about a year actually met with The chief and patty this morning to walk them through our budget model So, you know, I don't want to speak for them, but I will say they are very aware of this issue And I'm I think I can confidently say it's part of their planning calculus

Okay, that's good to hear. So it sounds like these groups who are also utilizing this software are realizing that it's got the same issues that internally in the city we're seeing that.

Yes, I mean, just to pick on PFA again, their staff has the same challenges that our staff does in terms of having to deal with a 30-year-old legacy system.

Okay, all right, thank you. Okay, hi, thanks. I have a question about thank you for sharing the lessons learned from other communities.

I really appreciate that you're going out and gathering that data.

Can you give us some specific lessons learned internally?

Yeah, so one lesson learned internally is that we've put together a governance structure for this project that is both has clear accountabilities but that can be nimble to adapt to the project as it goes forward so I am the executive sponsor for the project Teresa and Kevin are joining me on the executive steering committee for that we have determined that financial services is the responsible service area for sponsoring this project and have put together a number of clear accountabilities among the staff in financial services and then how the staff in HR and IT will come together to support that. So that whole governance structure was a learning partially born out of some of our experience on Vertex One. Teresa and I had a conversation with a representative for Bridgewater Consulting who's helped us on Vertex One and based on that conversation and some of the learnings we use that to finalize the governance model that we've put in place for this for this project Kevin I'll let you share

some others you know I'll add two consistent themes we've seen with all the other communities one don't treat it as a technology project treat it as a transformation around our business

in order to adopt those platforms. We'll have some latitude with configuration to ensure that we can meet the unique requirements that we might have with our funding and our chart of accounts. But that is one of the biggest mistakes others have made is not to rethink and they've struggled with that change resistance internally to address that proactively to say, look folks, we're gonna give you all the permission. The way that we manage our accounts, the way to manage our processes and services will change. And here is, this is the essential importance of these implementation partners that a lot of others foregone and decided to go it alone?

I'll give two others from internal projects here as well. So, you know, one is given the long history we've had on the utility CIS project, I will say our guard is very heightened going into the procurement process to make sure that we get a vendor with a track record of being able to deliver this type of system. You know, we want to see a vendor that has delivered a system to other municipal organizations, preferably in Colorado, of our scale. And it's happened recently and it's been successful. So I would say that is a piece of it. That's part of, too, what has informed us bringing in GFOA for kind of that final check of our requirements and having A MUNICIPAL CONSULTANT TO HELP US EVALUATE THE PROPOSALS THAT WE GET THROUGH THE PROCUREMENT PROCESS. ANOTHER LESSON LEARNED WAS WE'RE TRYING TO BE REALISTICALLY CONSERVATIVE WITH THE BUDGET ESTIMATE FOR THIS PROJECT. SO IDEALLY WE ARE NOT IN A SITUATION OF HAVING TO COME BACK TO COUNCIL FOR ADDITIONAL APPROPRIATIONS THAT ARE NOT PLANNED AS PART OF THIS PROJECT AS WELL.

so I'm just gonna add one for the past several years in HR we've been working on our workflows because the system is not what creates kludgyness it's the human beings not intentionally but just trying to do work around so we've been cleaning up our thought process and our workflows so that will be better ready for a new system so that's the one I would add it's been about the past three

years we've been doing that thank you so much yeah I love that Teresa because yes that's something we talked about a lot in software systems cannot fix a bad process thank you for bringing up culture that was gonna be my next piece of it is that yes it's culture change being put in there and then Caleb thank you for your explanation too but can you just talk a little bit what is that

governance structure going to provide? Like accountability?

Yeah, so that governance structure is ultimately set up for accountability and clear lines of responsibility. So every person who is working in the project knows what their accountability is and knows what they're supposed to be doing. You know, another thing that the organization as a whole that we're looking at with some of our larger technology projects as we have just set up a strategic transformation committee where the executives in the organization are meeting on a monthly basis to get updates on these large-scale technology projects that are currently underway ERP is going to be part of that reporting into that committee as well so you know the the main goal of the governance structure is to provide accountability and through providing accountability really be in a position to quickly make decisions so we can keep the project on track and on budget to the

greatest extent possible. Okay, great. Thank you. I'm not reading any of the questions I wrote down because I'm thinking of other ones instead. So what can council expect from here on out?

Yes. So what council can expect is depending on the scope of our needs here in 2026, it's possible there could be a request for a small supplemental appropriation in the current year to get some of the to continue the purchasing work. But the main thing council can expect is as part of the 2027 2028 budget that Kelly recommends to you the ERP project will will be a budgeted line item among a number of different funds. So that is going to be the next major touch point for council on this will be the budget process later this summer and in the fall.

Okay, thank you.

Other council members. I just had one question with the kind of culture and change. With other projects we hired, like a change management, we budgeted for it. Are we doing that for this project?

Yes, we are planning on change management resourcing as part of this project.

Oh, okay, great. That was easy. I think it's a great project. I was thinking, if I did my math right, we've had the system eight years before an iPhone came out. And so I think that's like a Nokia brick, which is like T9 texting. And I just think about like I think I just really dated myself, but I think about how far technology has come to Today since we've had this system. So I think it's time and thank you for bringing it forward I think you know We've been encouraging staff in the city to bring things like this for that were not as sexy and fun is like a new park But we really need to do this and it's gonna be really great for the city. So thank you

Anyone else yeah Chris yeah, I just I just want to I just want to thank you guys for your work.

I have a friend who does implementation or change management as a career for this exact

kind of software, and I asked her a bunch of what questions should I ask, and you guys

basically answered all of them exactly the way I was hoping you would. So just thank you, and I'm excited.

I think this is, again, really important to do earlier rather than later, and so I'm glad

we're doing it now.

And I know it's going to be I wish we could like open up some fun new thing that everyone can enjoy instead

But I think this is the right move for sure

Julie I guess those questions for Kelly How many more of these things you're going to bring forward before the budget comes forward and then we have to? pick and choose

This is the only one that's on my radar right now before the budget conversation that rises to this level so And again, it's been multi years coming to this point so No more big surprises

Any other questions or comments? All right, thank you. We'll take a short break and come back at 745

All right, welcome back we are on to our last item and I will turn it over to the city manager All right, and I am going to just immediately turn it over to Jacob Castillo, our Chief Sustainability Officer, to introduce this item.

Thank you, Kelly. I'm just going to turn it over. For better or worse, some of us started our day together, you know, around the 7 o'clock hour and are now closing our day together, which I am very pleased about. As mentioned, my name is Jacob Castillo. I'm the Chief Sustainability Officer. I'm joined by my colleagues, Sana Kendall and Shannon Hine from the Economic Health Office. We're here this evening to talk about how we keep businesses here, help them grow, how we attract firms to our area to create upwardly mobile job opportunities for folks in our community. I think it's worth saying that the work in economic development or economic health is especially the technical nature of it is often misunderstood and goes on kind of behind the scenes. Because we know how important this topic is to you, one of your top priorities, we want to make sure that tonight we're shedding light on some of the processes that we undertake around economic health. So the what, the how, and some of the outcomes that we're achieving as a result of our work. Tonight we are not necessarily asking for any major policy direction, but we are here to ensure understanding, alignment around one of your top priority areas that said we will be back in a couple weeks talking about a major policy question that we'll have for you but that's not for tonight tonight we're going to be talking about business retention expansion and attraction and the ongoing work that we're doing to bring good new jobs to our community so with that I'm going to hand it off to

Sana to kick us off great thank you so much and actually I think Jacob said all my kickoff slides so really one of the big components I will share with you is economic development is a team sport so even though we're going to be talking about it from economic health purview just wanting to share that it really is many organizations many departments also working in this space and really the coordination that takes place in that space as well

Jenny it's not working

Oh perfect thank you so how the agenda is going to go today we're going to start off with the council questions I'll be talking about the lead generation and site selection specifically for primary employers And then I'm going to hand it off to Shannon Hine to talk about our business retention and expansion In the approach that we take in those spaces and then go back to questions and discussion as always though please feel free to slow me down ask questions all of the above so with these three questions we really thought about what was the true intent of what we are asking council to talk about and give us in terms of information we really think about us economic health as a bridge or the

connective tissue or I like to say puzzler because I love puzzles and I love doing puzzles right and trying to figure out where things fit but we know that

that many other departments, many other people, and council also talk to businesses. So a big conversation is, are we listening to businesses in a structured way,

and are we using what we learn or hear to make better decisions and inform policy development?

So really, that common thread of how local government, council, and staff are really gathering,

interpreting, and using inputs from the business and residents in the community as a whole to shape policy. So that's really what the three questions are as you know kind of that throws through line within that

At the end of 2024 we did do an update to our economic health strategic plan as well as an update in terms of council priorities

and so really I think the big component of this is not only is it intentional and integrated both internally and externally

Again, it's a full ecosystem that we're working through so it's not just one project. It's not one company It's not one department. It really is multiple layers of coordination and work in this space

Why it matters again under council priority

Bolstering economic vitality with a focus on small businesses neighborhood centers and quality job creation It really does help give clear direction in terms of that work The state of Colorado just released a report for the end of Q 2025. State of Colorado for the first time has lost jobs.

So the state of Colorado has lost 11,700 jobs in 2025. The first time we've seen this dip since 2020 and prior to 2020, the first time we've seen that dip since 2011. So we are seeing this impact in terms of the jobs and the declining and contraction of jobs in our communities.

I Know at the January 27th. We also talked really about this work model that we've been looking at in terms of What does it mean to be business friendly and how are we going to look at it from an organization perspective? But also as a community as a whole and so you'll see today We're really going to be talking about the green box there Which is around business attraction business retention and expansion And what I will share with you is that business retention and expansion is not just primary employer work It is for our main street businesses as well. And so Shannon will talk a lot about that as well so again, I think one of the big components is Intentional bre which is the business retention and expansion Acronym is core to what eh o does so it's always about learning what is happening in our business community How do we iterate? How do we make sure and share that information up to leadership? So that you can make those informed business decisions the

Pink orange box is really about the fiscal policy the incentives and the regulations will be coming back on April 28th as Jacob had mentioned to talk specifically about the update to the business assistance policy and

And so wanting to just share that with you as well. So we'll talk about that at that later date.

In terms of economic context and background, nothing new that you haven't heard before, really.

It's about how do we create quality jobs and upward mobility opportunities for our community members with an anchor of our primary employers.

in Fort Collins we are competing nationally and globally not just at the

local level and our existing businesses are actually other communities opportunities for business attraction so we are seeing that and we'll talk a little bit about that and how we see them come across in our site selection processes as well and one of the big piece I will share is we don't go after every project that we hear about or that is requested for information we really are looking at what aligns with the industry clusters and the approved

industries that council has approved but also what aligns with all city goals and not just economic health goals in those spaces a lot of times we are not only playing offense we're playing defense so when we talk about BRE specifically we are talking about offense but there are times we also have to play defense in

terms of how do we help keep business here it's here and how do we make sure that they know that they are valued and appreciated in this.

economic development organization called NCEDC Northern Colorado Economic Development Corp they did all of the prospect activity in terms of business attraction responding to RFI's they would not bring in the communities until the very end and so sometimes it didn't align with our communities or the discussions have happened so far it's hard to manage expectations in those spaces as well and so just sharing that you know I think one of the nice pieces is in 2018 the Northern Colorado Regional Economic Development Initiative form and that is all the economic developers in Northern Colorado working together and really looking at this from a holistic approach we are still in competition with each other but we also want to be really complementary to one another in those spaces so the middle figure is really how does an RFI come to us a request for information and that can be from the state office of economic development that can be from Metro Denver Economic Development Corp who is the contractor for all edit really to help in those spaces it can come directly from a site selector to the community or from the business when we're just meeting with the businesses so definitely that comes in through that funnel and you'll see we talked about the communities working together with the commercial brokers as well as the landowners and then also business and industry to get this comprehensive and unified Northern Colorado package submittals so we will submit any of the requests as a full community of Northern Colorado so they'll see Fort Collins just like they'll see Greely's all in this one unified voice in terms of 2025 we did get 52 inquiries one of the pieces we talk a lot about and I'll talk about on the next slide is which ones are the fort collins active in and what are those spaces when we see this large number in terms of capital investments into the communities those are estimates so keep that in mind and then when folks look at the new jobs a lot of folks kind of panic and go oh my gosh are you bringing in 15 370 new people for us it is not about that it is about opportunities for our community members in terms of economic mobility and opportunities for wealth generation in those spaces and then the last opponent on it on your right side is just the regional economic development clusters that we have identified as a region so northern Colorado Weld and Lamar County and all the communities within that everyone has kind of their specialty for Fort Collins it really is in the IT space, the clean energy space, and then in bio life sciences and semiconductors. So those are typically the ones that we respond to as well as aerospace because that's been one that we're starting to see a lot of

generation and interest in specifically in northern Colorado and I think the airport and all of the activity there has really helped in that space as well.

So this one is about the active projects that we are currently working on. So we are currently working on nine prospects.

The known pipeline is about $1.7 billion in terms of capital expenditure. So that's for purchases of land, buildings, as well as in terms of the infrastructure that needs to be put into that and manufacturing and equipment. And then the potential jobs is over 1,000 for these nine prospects. And again, this is not 1,000 new people.

this really is about 1,000 new opportunities for our community members as a whole. In terms of recent wins, I'm going to highlight two, just because I think the Anheuser-Busch story, I'd really like to go into a little bit more detail.

As you heard, in July of last year, USDA announced that they had selected hubs, and Fort Collins was named one of the hubs. This month USDA has announced that the centralized forest services is going to have Fort Collins will be housing the research and development enterprise as well as an operational service center.

The headquarter for USDA forest services will be in Salt Lake.

We anticipate we are going to see more announcements from USDA specifically in the agricultural spaces and that's where the value add is in Fort Collins in what we have.

One of the components I will share on that is when we were hosting USDA, it wasn't just Fort Collins representing Fort Collins. It was a full region. So we had well county commissioners, Greeley City Manager, Fort Collins City Manager, Town of Windsor and all others saying welcome. We're here for you and there's a lot of variety and opportunities in those spaces.

So the one that I would like to talk about in terms of prospect inquiries is first off to share with you they take a really, really long time.

So the first time we got this project, it actually came in as a project name.

So we did not know it was Anheuser-Busch when we responded to it. And that came in 2022.

As we move through the process and they've told us we've met second round and then we met third round is when it was highlighted that we were actually

That this we were working with Anheuser-Busch in this space

one of the things I will share again when we talked about our businesses are sometimes other people's opportunities and other communities opportunities that project inquiry went out to all the states that Anheuser-Busch had plants in

as well as the full state of Colorado communities so it was ours really to

lose in the in terms of that so we worked really hard with Anheuser-Busch

and really talked about the alignment of their climate goals as well as our

climate goals because for them specifically they were really working on creating the second carbon-neutral facility for Anheuser-Busch in the US And so that was one where a commitment of 52 million dollars of that 52 million dollars 13 million was specifically to advance technologies to Achieve carbon neutrality inefficiencies. So we saw a lot of investments in those spaces So with city leadership in January of 2025

We actually went to st. Louis to the headquarters to say thank you for investing in us and continue to partner with us We have a great relationship with Anheuser-Busch.

I actually just met with the plant manager this month.

And one of the things that I would like to share is they're actually doing an expansion outside of the $52 million commitment that they have made.

So in December of 2025, Anheuser-Busch actually announced closures of two breweries and the sale of a third brewery.

And so for us to see that there is a commitment to continue to invest in Fort Collins and really see that development and job growth happening here is one that we call a really big win in those spaces. And I like to believe it's that we have really put that personal touch of Fort Collins and having city leadership go out and say, we value you as a partner and let us help align with our goals and your goals in terms of getting to carbon neutral.

And we didn't want to continue to talk about this without talking about when you get a

fun learning opportunity or when those projects tend to go outside of your control in terms of that.

So the one that I would talk about is in 2024, we actually got a project request. It was called Project Telluride. We did not know who they were but in terms of the water requests that they were looking for as well as the land

We were saying we don't know if we have that right fit here in Fort Collins at the end of Q3 of 2025 Project tell your right site selectors reached out specifically to Fort Collins and said no we really do want you to

Submit a site we want to we believe that the workforce in the environment in northern Colorado really is helpful for our

business units and so we want to see what that looks like so when we worked through that um we

did find out it was a subsidiary of coca-cola and we partnered with california state university to look at the prospect and i-25 site because that was the only one that really would meet the size requirement that they were looking for in terms of that some of the lessons learned is what about site readiness when you propose a project and you know the business's timeline do you know what the site readiness is going to take and how much it'll cost but the timing of those things as well as water is a big conversation and so where are those water rights and how do we help folks really understand that water is something that we need to walk through and then incentives so they were talking to us early on about incentives and those are things that again when we're looking at our existing policy we were talking about manufacturing equipment at potentially a 50% rebate but that's it right for this one specifically so if

you haven't heard at the end of last year the coca-cola subsidiary announced

that they had selected Colorado Springs for their site it is a site that was site ready it was right next to the Amazon distribution center it is in the urban renewal authority so they received tax incentives as well as from this city of Colorado Springs they received fee waivers as well so just being able to

talk with them and understand and get feedback from a company about what we did right and what we did wrong and how we can learn lessons from that I think

is an important component of that so that is all about the prospecting pieces of when we're responding to requests for informations from different businesses I

I want to hand it off to Shannon Hine specifically to talk about the business retention and expansion programs. Yes.

Can I just ask two clarifying questions, please? Could you remind me of the name of the Northern Colorado Regional Economic what? Initiative.

And it is called, so we call it NOCO Ready, and Colorado State University also has a NOCO Ready. Oh, okay. Thank you. Everyone has a Ready. How's that? Regional Economic Development Initiative.

And then can you quickly repeat the geography of the clusters, the industry clusters, the color key? For Fort Collins specifically?

Yes, please. Yes. So specifically our kind of clusters in Fort Collins are the BioLife Science Medical Devices, IT, that's hardware, software, and quantum. And the energy one actually includes both traditional and clean, but for Fort Collins we're really focused on the clean energy. So we're seeing some really cool clean energy technology such as laser and laser fusion in those spaces And then the other one is semiconductors and then the newer one that we're starting to see a lot of conversations around is around aerospace with the airport Conversations as well as the incentives that the city of Loveland is giving we are seeing a lot of interest in northern Colorado as a whole So even though Loveland's the only one that has stated we're going to go out and attract in terms of aerospace

We are seeing interest all over northern, Colorado Thank you All right, I'm gonna hand it over to Shannon. Thank you, Sana and good evening council

Now as we transition into our existing businesses and why they're so important our existing businesses make up 80% of our net new jobs in the community As you know, they create our culture our amenities that we all love and enjoy This is an opportunity for us to build trust and build relationships and be a welcome mat for our businesses So they feel welcome so that they know that government is accessible here in Fort Collins BRE we don't call a program here because it is such a core function of what we do It's an opportunity for us to reach out nurture our local companies That keeps our community competitive as sauna said and it keeps our businesses competitive as well It also provides opportunities for us to understand what's working for them. What's not? Are there some early warning signs that we can identify before things get too bad for them where they either have to Relocate or close as well?

Oh, yeah, sorry

So how this shows up and how we approach it is really through three what we call three modes of engagement strategic and proactive more signal-based and reactive where a business is coming to us and then we have this open door customer service kind of welcome that opportunity so with strategic and proactive this is really us reaching out for one-on-one visits can we can we meet can we learn more about your business model can we see your site this is probably reoccurring it's probably happening with either leadership or different members of our team as sana said this could be a large employer but it could also be a small legacy business as well and so it's somebody that we want to keep an eye on and that

we want to monitor even if they decline a meeting we are still monitoring through google alerts or

you know we're keeping tabs on liquor licensing development review and conceptual review submittals as well so we can keep an eye on what's going on with our businesses signal based this is more reactive so this is when a business might need us so this is an opportunity if they are struggling with a process navigation within the city if they're on a barrier maybe around workforce or something like that and they don't know where to go we can be that place where they start within the city to help identify those barriers and and work with them to do that and Then last is just our open door or what we call passive. So this is just our response, customer service. We have a business email that folks can reach out to. This is an opportunity for us to do pop-ins and check in with businesses. As Sana said, this is all very time intensive as well. The strategic and signal-based are really high-touch opportunities for us to engage with businesses. The other piece to this is a business might come in with...

in on them and seeing how they're doing throughout their life cycle.

So what does this look like in real life? First, I'll add, our team meets weekly. Tyler Manzales is our senior manager and leads weekly pipeline meetings. And so it's an opportunity for us to get together every week, talk about who we've met with that week, who needs help, can we brainstorm some solutions for specific businesses it's also an opportunity for us to write cards and celebrate businesses that we hear about through milestones or her or who are opening up a new business and so our team signs those city manager's office is often signing those as well and it gives us an opportunity to open the door and say hello to a business and i bring that up as well because we have some opportunities here where that has really helped us connect so on the strategic proactive side the new small retailer downtown cherry on top bookstore just a very cute shop we delivered a card to them congratulate them for opening walked in with the card just a simple conversation with the owners but led to a really great conversation where they had 11 questions we counted because they had so many great questions pfa was here earlier but they were like how do I get my PFA checklist inspection how do I figure out what my occupancy is I want a short-term parking spot outside of my door how do I get that and so I think it was really thoughtful questions that if we could incorporate that into some of our business guidelines would help educate future businesses as well so walked in with a card left with 11 ways to help as Tana said some of this is confidential and so we are working with a local manufacturer in the growth management area we had scheduled a visit to meet with them to learn more about their business before we had met with them realized they submitted plans for expansion and so that helped open up that conversation when we met with them to talk about that they had some clarifying questions that we were able to help with and then also led to conversations around volunteer annexation and so that process is still moving forward On the signal base and reactive side, we had some existing relationships with Cohere, the co-working space, as well as Old Town Media, a marketing agency here in town. Old Town Media owns a building on Remington.

Cohere, their lease was expiring and didn't have a place to go. They reached out and said, hey, we need help finding a space. We knew Old Town Media had extra space in their building and they were looking to sell a portion of it. So we were able to make a match there and then Cohere actually ended up buying a portion moved in. So when you drive down their building on Remington now you can see both signs. The great part about this one is Cohere reached out after and said if you had not made that match we would have gone out of business. And so that one is important because it's not just the business but there's a lot of remote workers taking advantage of that. There's a lot of solopreneurs and small businesses that are also working there that would have been impacted by that closure as well. And then last is our open door or passive examples.

And so we do have a monthly newsletter that we send out to businesses with resources and information. We have a business email. We have seen an uptick in inquiries and questions on that this year, which is great to see. So we can help traffic control that and get them to the right place.

But a win here is through a tax credit program called the Enterprise Zone. So we only had about 97 Fort Collins businesses taking advantage of that just a little bit over a year ago. and through our outreach with both our newsletter and being intentional about bringing up programs like this and all of our BRE visits we've been able to see an increase from 97 to over 500 and just a little over a year of businesses registering for that program a lot of them don't even know some of these things exist and so it's an opportunity for us to just educate and inform and then just some of the images here of just headlines of businesses that gave us an opportunity to connect and reach out

So as you can imagine, we hear a lot of unique challenges, but also opportunities and challenges that impact businesses across the board. With that, some of this work is within our control and some of it just isn't. So wanting to bring that up and how this plays out. Within our control, our businesses only benefit when we, as Sana said, this is a team sport. So as long as we're building relationships and connecting with our partners, the Chamber, Laramie County economic work and workforce small business development center as well as our own departments utilities planning sales tax and those that are all interacting with businesses they only benefit from that so that's a really important piece to all of this how we help businesses are always reaching out what permits do I need how do I stay in compliance and so it's an opportunity again for us to help navigate that a lot of that work is done on the forefront that is visible but i would also add that a lot of the ways we help is on the back end and work that people just don't see and so an example of that is we're working with building zoning city clerk sales tax finance enough ceiling pooter fire authority to help with the business licensing process making that easier to follow so that businesses know when and where they're in compliance and so that work is kind of behind the scenes but very impactful to the resiliency of our businesses and then out of our control is just a lot of the themes we're hearing right now are just these market forces that we can't we can't control and so what does that mean just to highlight a few we've heard from a lot of businesses recently they would like to expand or they would like to open up a second location or buy another building but they're just too hesitant right now and how the economy is playing out right now to trust that property taxes and insurance understanding how their lease is structured has been very impactful to businesses and so taking that in and trying to navigate that as well as a lot of questions around utilities and annexation so as i mentioned before we had a business who was asking about voluntary annexation businesses know about the reliability of fort collins utilities we're getting a lot of questions right now about businesses that are not on fort collins utilities about how they can voluntarily annexed to take advantage of that I share that too because these are without of our control but it's important for us to all understand what businesses are facing so that when we are making these policy or process decisions we can keep that in mind to understand the full scope for our

businesses all right so when we talk about how we do the tracking of progress There are a couple that we're really monitoring, which is around market dynamics, businesses openings, closures and expansions, the job growth specifically in the key industries that we're following, and then sales and use tax revenue. And one of the conversations we've been talking about is that's great numbers to have, but what does it really mean and how does it really inform us? So it's really how do we take these dollars and the numbers and cents and really connect it to the qualitative information that we're hearing from businesses to really understand the economic realities that they're facing to really help inform policy as well as provide hopefully excellent customer service. right so we're these EHO by the numbers we just wanted to share how we had been tracking what we were doing in terms of our business visits EHO so economic health has in 2025 had 20 or sorry nine FTEs and we currently have seven FTEs so really proud of the work in the outreach we're doing in those spaces with the limited staff one of the pieces also I'd love to highlight is the the story here in the left and I always butcher their name Arboradium Arboradium the business so we actually had one of our business connectors go in and say hello and just connect with them and when talking with the not only the business owner they were talking about their students and being able to have interest in terms of entrepreneurship so our bilingual business connectors worked with the owner and created a cohort model and helped them through this apprenticeship opportunity in these spaces so we are seeing some really unique opportunities there and then I think with that again are these questions so what information would help counsel explain economic development decisions to community members what kind of issues challenges raised by local businesses should be elevated to council what signals or trends help guide your policy decisions and then as mentioned council members often meet with businesses so how do we collect that information to help inform our work as well great thank you that

was a very comprehensive presentation in a good way yes yes yes yes no no it was very helpful yeah in a good way it's very comprehensive do council members have questions or comments. Yeah, Josh. I guess I'll go first. In regard to question

number two, what kinds of issues or challenges have been raised? With the business owners that I've talked to, whether when I was first running for office or since being sworn in, it's in a lot of ways felt like death by a thousand cuts. It's not been one particular policy, but it's been a fee increase here, a standard there, what have you. So I know there's lots of different city departments or policies that impact that, but maybe we need to, or if there's a better way to have kind of a holistic view of all of those changes in a way, or maybe take better account of that. I think maybe, I don't know if this is question number one or number three but um i love the the bre approach that you have it's i didn't know this existed and i really appreciate it but one thing i didn't hear unless i missed it which is entirely possible is how is that information being sent to us because i would like to know what are you hearing and if you're hearing about it in august i would rather not wait till march for an annual report if that makes sense so i don't know if there's a quarterly or something whether it's a written document or a report or maybe you've already thought of this yes um that that kind of says here the trends we're hearing here's the here's the things um i think that would be be really useful and then it's funny you brought up the the business here on remington because i think it was their owner or or manager who sent an email about parking downtown and it made me realize that again i may have missed it but we've heard a lot from parking services about the mechanics of parking but i don't feel like we've gotten a holistic business view i know we've heard from businesses who are opposed to it for reasons but i'm thinking of employee parking of shared spaces permits is there a business perspective that would help with that you know discussion again aside from the please don't do it because we don't like it so hopefully that makes sense yes

thank you okay Melanie eventually yeah and this is this is similar to Josh I liked your third question a lot because you're right we oftentimes even have businesses reach out you know they're the organic conversations but also you know coffee dates with a business owner where they've got something specific And so I guess my question is, how would you like us to communicate that? Do you want us to invite you if we're doing a one-on-one? Do you want us to call you, shoot you an email? Like, what would be helpful if specific issues are being raised in our council duties?

Am I okay to answer it, or would you? Okay. We're always happy to send one of our staffers with you if you'd like to. Because, again, I think it's about building trust and relationships. and those take a long time, right? And if that business has trust with you, it would be helpful to have that relationship, right? So we're always happy to have that. In addition, I think even just through city manager's office and through Kelly D, right? I know you all meet with Kelly often, and so even sharing that with her. So we do meet monthly as economic health and city manager's office, and we talk about just what city manager's office is hearing, what council is hearing, and what economic health is hearing in those spaces too.

Oh, that's a great suggestion. I don't usually fill Kelly in on those kinds of meetings, and so I'll work on that. And then I guess the only other piece of feedback that I have heard,

and I was really happy to see that you guys did zero in on our smaller businesses a little bit,

is I think a previous conversation we had,

there were folks who felt like we were very focused on the primary employers and so I love seeing that you do really value our folks who are already here small and large I love the personal touch that I mean I think that's a really great example of like we went to say hey welcome to the community and they were like hey we have all these great questions and you were able to support and my my guess is that business is going to be feel more solidly rooted they know where to go in the

future it builds investment in our community i mean i just love that you're doing that so i think as much as you can amplify all the things you're doing with your small staff to support our local and small businesses i think it's very much appreciated so thank you

yeah thanks again for walking us through all that um i want to kind of echo what i've heard from what josh mentioned just a lot of like and then one more thing and then it's one more thing and

one more thing and um the siloing of different departments some with some that aren't even with

the city but um still expectations of like if i just want you know i had a business owner who

just wanted to add an extra freezer because so he could expand his company and it turned into

huge huge issue so I think that as Melanie mentioned that personal touch will be helpful in that way thank you for offering like how to get that in

the departments involved in like an expansion of a business or whatever it is to have that mindset of like how do i get to yes if the immediate answer is no then how do i get to yes and if that is an actual policy change then yeah bring it to us like give us the situation and the impact and if it's something worth considering would love to do it so i just want to encourage not just your staff but staff throughout the city like bring us those suggestions because we really it will take

all of us to help this succeed so thanks i'll just add um i agree with everyone's comments um one thing i do when i meet with businesses is i ask can i connect you to staff and then i'll send an email and just copy i don't know probably jacob is usually who i copy um and uh so that usually helps is just that warm handoff. I would say, you know, I do hear a lot about just like the, and then I learned that then I had to do this thing the same as everyone else is saying. And if I remember correctly, we don't do a business license, right? We just, once I get a sales tax

license, then that's what we count. Correct. It's a, Shannon, what are they calling that specifically? It's not a business license. It's a sales tax account. Yes. Thank you. I just made,

I mean, you all are the experts, and I understand not adding bureaucracy to things, but the number of times I've heard people not understanding who they need to contact or, like, cherry on top not knowing they needed a CO and they're open, like, that's not great. or knowing that they need to check what their CO is for and if it's for the right use, right? I would just say that maybe a business license may be a way to help facilitate people knowing everything up front, who they go to, what they need to do so that they can open and then not have to find out later that there's another thing. So I know we've traditionally stayed away from that. And then I would just say that as we are kind of figuring out this um incentives and you know there's a great um overview of like why things worked why didn't work i think as we're figuring out the incentives just bringing things forward to make sure that we're on the same page as we navigate this to make sure that we're aligning policies and that you all have the feedback you need um because this is new territory for us and so if there are things that you just need feedback on and if you're going in the right direction um i would just say you know like Julie said just bring those to us that's that's fine I think that was all your questions so okay anyone else Amy thank you could you I know this is

probably a silly question and could you elaborate though a little bit more because I do hear this often that it is a new process for us what does that mean

In terms of business attraction. So in the past, we did not do business attraction. So what that means is we are not going proactive. We were not going proactively in talking to businesses that maybe Colorado State University was working with or others in terms of being saying, hey, this aligned or you're a part of a great supply chain and we think this would fit. and so we're working on a business attraction project charter and work in terms of doing that so the first year was really about learning how other communities are doing that so going to certain things such as site selector conferences we went to select USA that was very overwhelming I will say in terms of being able to see what the international and what the states are doing in terms of that what we try to do in terms of those attraction projects is really partner with OEDIT, so the Office of Economic Development and International Trade, so the state of Colorado, or Metro Denver, Innisfire, or Colorado State University in those spaces, really to, again, align and make sure that they're aware of what we're looking for, but that we're also partnering with them to understand the full structure and packages that we can put together. Does that help?

It helps a ton, because then I'm just curious, with the recent wins and ones that are in the pipeline, Did we utilize any okay? Thank you for thank you

Yeah, so for the Anheuser-Busch project specifically we connected them with the state of Colorado workforce department specifically for job training grants As they were developing apprenticeship programs as well as they're working with the Colorado community college system specifically to create a technical training certificate for their technicians specifically in addition working with energy efficiencies and really understanding what are all the rebates that Anheuser-Busch was eligible for and then working with Landerburg County to get some business personal property tax rebates for them as well so those were so we also like to help other businesses find other people's money instead of city of Fort Collins's money so really trying to give them the ombudsman throughout the whole project thank you for helping me through

that. And I am going to be really curious to learn more about the fostering of entrepreneurship in our community and how that leads to additional workforce opportunities, additional businesses. So I look forward to further conversations in that lane.

Perfect. Yeah. I have just actually a question that might sort of a response to question number one. I'm not sure that, and I think we've gotten information about like the number of jobs in Fort Collins and that sort of thing, but can you help give me like a couple more statistics about like the Fort Collins economy? Like I'm clearly not an economist, so I don't like, do we have a GDP? Like what are the metrics and where are we at? And like those are the sort of things that might help bigger picture understand these, when you say $1.7 billion of projects, like potential projects in the pipeline, what is the impact of that? That sort of thing.

Yeah. So in March, I believe council got a community and business profile. Probably did. Oh no. I mean, you guys get a lot of memos. Sorry. Thank you for reminding me. What's nice about this is working with finance and the centralized data teams, being able to get all of this information for you. So in terms of business establishments, we say we have about 7,100, but that fluctuates based on the number of starts and closes in those spaces. In terms of sales tax licenses, or sorry, sales tax accounts, we have over 12,000. Again, because of the Colorado Nexus Law, if you do business here and you hit a certain revenue, you do need to have a sales tax account here. In terms of jobs, we're at about 94,900. We did see a loss of jobs, specifically in our targeted industries of life sciences and in technology. As you've seen in the industries, tech is kind of reinventing itself. a lot focus on AI data centers and quantum and so we're seeing our Fort Collins tech companies really adjusting to that and really kind of trying to

contract and grow in those spaces thank you and not to belittle the work that's done that's passed along like it is a fire hose and trying to keep up but that helps me understand the economy a bit more I'm not sure that I have much more to add I feel like in this sphere at this moment it's just trying to get my head around where we're at and what we need so thank you really for all of your

work we're always happy to meet one-on-one or you know have smaller conversations if you want to ask some questions a big deeper into any topic

or data perfect thank you I would also like to just say we have always offered if there's a business you're interested in meeting that we might have a relationship so it's a reciprocal relationship so we shouldn't just say oh we need you to give us those relationships we do have a lot of relationships as well and so happy to also reciprocate in those spaces great

thank you anyone else okay see nothing do you all have what you need yes okay

great um does council have any announcements oh Julie I think we have

quite a few listening sessions coming up in the next week so uh there's the earth day celebration at odell on saturday and amy i think you're there 11 to 1 30 11 to 12 30 to 12 30 yep someone's there 12 30 to 1 30 i thought and then i'm there 1 30 to 3 so council will be present at Earth Day. Council will be present at Earth Day at Odell's.

Well, and then I have an additional one this Thursday at CSU at 5 o'clock in the ASCSU Senate chambers. Any other announcements? Okay, see none. That's all. Good night, Fort Collins.