discussion, which will be delivered to us by our public works team, J. Rowe and Dolgavernick, Ravnick, is that better? No, it's still on. I'm trapped. And Larry Nemo. So I will go ahead and turn it over to you guys. Thank you. Great. Thank you. So what we wanted to do tonight is we're going to do a presentation. Is this the same one that's on everything? Yeah, it's the same one that's on here. So what we wanted to do tonight is we've done some recent anchor trenching. There's some people that want to use it to install things, and based on what we've seen in other organizations and talking to other organizations, we're going to show you why we feel like we need to postpone it for at least another meeting to see what has something to shake out. So go ahead and go to the next slide. So we wanted to make sure that we were provided some of the legal comments here. The one thing that stopping microtrenching within the right-of-way, saying, no, we can't allow that in our roads, that is not in any way discriminating against any company. We're simply saying that's not a process we want to have. do this and things, and you'll see once Jay does his presentation, what we're talking about. And it's based on another community where we went and did some witnessing of it all. So next slide. So we wanted to, this is local governments we can't charge with, or it'd be in there. So we understood that part. that we can, as far as the permits and license agreements and all of those good things, we have our full authority for all of that. So that is all under our auspices. So we're, yeah, and the city hasn't, thank you, the city hasn't acted provisions for the style of comps and stuff like that. So we're ready to go once we get one going. So Jay, why don't you, I think you have the next one. Yeah. the slice off or put me to sleep. So what we're going to do, you have to hit the next one. Oh, okay. Gotcha. Okay. So let's, let's take a look to find what it is. So we're going to, we're going to talk about what micro trenching is and the possibilities of how this could fit. This technique could fit or may not fit into Kessel Pines. So staff is public works. particularly has put in quite a bit of time here researching this specific kind of utility insulation. So the definition is pretty straightforward. If you want to, please hit the next slide. So, you know, a couple of us have visited local communities, and this was towards the end of 2024, where we could actually see the fiber insulation, the fiber octagonal. And these are pictures of subcontractors putting in the actual cable. So in the first picture, you can see it's typically between the asphalt and the concrete, like so right at the joint, so it fits pretty good. And second picture is the actual installation of the cable. And then they come around with like a, a grout to fill in that joint that they have made. So basically, little trench, lay a cable in there. Pretty straightforward. Go ahead to the next slide, please. So this might be a video still. This is a typical application. So here's your grout truck. So after they do that little slice, they pour, it looks like a concrete drop. So concrete comes in, fills up the gap. And next slide, please. And it fills through this little machine here. And that's pretty much the process of micro-trenching. After the cable is installed, we'll probably talk a little bit more about this, but it's, it's brought underneath that gutter and into boxes located between the sidewalk and property. We'll see some of that in a minute. Next slide, please. These are just some end results of what the streets may look like after they're sealed. And I think there was kind of an extra slide for it. And if you want to hit the next one too, it's, And it's just images of what the streets could look like. So those are typical edges there. When they're crossing their areas, they're going to have to make some cuts in the road as well. So just an idea of the aesthetics here. Man, it's a dull. Can you ask process changes before we go into? Thank you. Thank you. Third time's the charm. So I'm asking a question about the process since you just reviewed that. Is it common in microtrenching to actually leave fiber and not conduit? It would be fiber in the conduit, yeah. So in this example of Lakewood, does Lakewood own the fiber or who owns the fiber? The city does not own the fiber. The utility contract, sorry. The utility would own the fiber. Okay. And conduit. And conduit. So my process question, I'm not asking about future stuff. My process question is we ran conduit on Monarch. So would you run fiber alongside and conduit? How does that work? Yeah, well, it would be separate utility company, different technique, right? So I guess it's... whatever technique you choose to run, it would be the same thing, right? Some people would do it in a micro-trench, and then other utility companies could do it, you know, traditionally, like boring, in a, you know, easement. Because that exists all on Monarch today, right? Thank you. Did I answer you? You did, okay. One question. You really seal that up. What happens when something has to be repaired? Or is it when you have a repair problem? Well, when something has to be repaired, it's the obligation of the owner, the utility owner, to take care of that. Slowly. Similarly to any other utility. Whether it's underneath the road, even a big water sewer. I have general questions. Should I do that now or later? Right over here, but I'll get through that. Next slide, please. So you kind of saw some of the visual representation of what the road might look like, you know, and there's a big giant metal spinning wheel that just comes and just eats through the road. Once they leave the trench and they have done some sort of technology to get from the street trench into the property, they have to set one of these handholds between every other property. So you have one handhold that feeds to adjacent properties. And they set those on the utility side of your house. So everyone has gas meter, you know, whatever on the side of their house, electric meter. So they set the handle on that side of the house. And then at a certain point, if you subscribe to their service, then they will have someone else come out and they'll hook up from these handholds to your house. And that's how you would get high-speed internet. Next slide. Turn around. Oh, Charlie, would you go back again? I got caught in those handholds. I want to highlight those bullet points real quick. Sorry, Charlie, would you mind going backwards the slide? Thank you. So there are concerns about the aesthetics of these trench, these handholds. Not everyone wants them in their manicured lawn, landscaping, whatever. Also, when they come to install actual internet to your property, they will have to, like I mentioned, they will have to go from the handhold to your house, and they generally will do that with some sort of a trenching device or machine somehow. Now, they have done tens of thousands of homes, so they have good techniques to minimize and they'll restore, but there is a risk of having your landscaping, rocks, whatever, disturbed, and maybe they're not so happy with it. Okay, now I'll try to go to the next slide. So in our research here, we've been looking around and trying to figure out. So we did go visit Lakewood. And so there's been about 189 plus miles. This is about over a million feet of microtrenching that's been installed in Colorado. We highlighted a few agencies here like Lakewood. That's where we went and visited. They've been doing it for a while now. Those are some of our test cases. Westminster and Weembridge, they have active construction. Golden, Adams, and Douglas counties have all approved it. We just reached out to Douglas County recently, and the provider is just laying out the trunk lines. They're not doing any microtrenching in neighborhoods yet. So when the infrastructure provider has to come in, they have to design the whole network. Now, they'll do it neighborhood by neighborhood, but you referenced Castle Pines Parkway. That doesn't get microtrenched. The main trunk lines will get bored. usually, or even an open trench if it's, you know, off to the side of the road or something like that. But all of that stuff are major trunk lines, big conduits, much too, it's too big for micro-trenching. The micro-trenching primarily only happens on the residential streets for it to connect into the individual properties. And then you can see there, Arvada, Aurora, and the city of Denver have rejected micro-trenching as a method of installing conduit. Do we know what our reasons are? Yeah, we sort of do, and there's mixed messages out there, primarily because of concerns about, well, I think we have on the next slide. I'll answer if it's not. Thank you. Next slide, please. So I'll do the pros first, okay? So microtrenching is extremely fast. While Jay and I were standing outside, the micro trench would show up on one side of the property. And then within about 10 minutes, it's passed. And then 10 more minutes, it's got conduit getting laid. And then they're hooking up to the handhold. And then 10-ish more minutes, here comes that slurry truck and they're backfilling it. And the nice thing, too, is that the trench is so small. If anyone ever needs to drive over it, you can. It's not like a big open utility trench where, like, I'm familiar with on water, 15 feet wide. These are always traversable. And so the impact to the resident is very minimal as far as like accessing their driver or something like that. The pro. So one of the things that we haven't really highlighted yet is the pro of this is that homes can potentially get very high speed asynchronous traffic. fiber to their homes. They can get one gigabit up and down. As a reference, some of the COAX products, which is very traditional in the west side of our city, download speeds can get up to 500 megabit, but upload speeds can generally be like 35 megabit, which is a fraction of what fiber can offer. So, you know, why are we talking about all this? What we're talking about all of it is if residents want access to high-speed fiber internet, then this is one method for it to get delivered to them. And then, of course, you know, capitalism and supply and demand, so the providers have to provide it at a cost-effective rate so that people will sign up for it. So, you know, we didn't really comment if something was affordable or expensive. We just kind of said it's market pricing for the individual to figure out if it works for them. Next slide. So I think here's – I can't – I'll try to hide that I remember exactly what city members said, but here are some of the cons of microtrenching. In some of the rural areas, when there isn't a asphalt-to-curb-and-gutter transition and there isn't that natural joint to microtrench, like when they're going to Douglas County in some of the rural areas, they're actually going to go and go one to two feet into the roadway. entrenched through there. You know, it may not be a big deal, but it's a little bit different than if it's an urban environment. It is newer insulation process. And so I know that like in the city of Austin, this process has been occurring for about 10 years. So it's maybe not new to them, but it's certainly new to Colorado. So I think there's still some, you know, long-term implications, observations that people are still figuring out. There's always a risk of water, you know, getting into this trench and causing failing pavements and that kind of stuff. Because we've added a joint to the pavement. I've already mentioned the risk of hand holes or just really the aesthetic of it and the inconvenience of it. You know, one of the things that Jay's been really sensitive to as our Buckets 1 and 2 manager is, you know, this would be work that would be occurring in our city that needs to be managed. inspected. You know, what are expectations? What are work hours? How are we communicating with the residents in the impacted neighborhoods? Where are they crossing the major roads? And so, you know, other municipalities that have approved this, they have written into the contracts that the vendor will pay for inspection services that are managed by the city. So that way it's a no cost. But that way we can be sure that the trench depth is the right depth we want and its location is approximate. And really the finishing of it, if there's residential complaints, and I think also just the upfront communication that makes sure that's happened properly so people will just wake up and be like, what are you doing in front of my house? So they know it's coming because it has happened. You know... Well, because we do have our buckets one and two work, we are always looking ahead in our capital plan of what's doing. So, you know, ideally you would want to do any type of this type of trench work ahead of any kind of capital improvement projects. So that way when they do come through and do improvements or mill and overlay, you know, it gives you a clean slate. You would take out the top two or three inches of that micro trench and then it would all be nice and new and looking nice. So you would just want to make sure that we're coordinating that work appropriately. There are aesthetic concerns. There's erosion concerns. And then, you know, we will have, I mean, someone would potentially have a new utility 18 inches deep. And so a mill and overlay, no big deal. But if we were going to reconstruct the roadway or have to do major waterline repairs, then the vendor has to, they would come and relocate their utility to a temporary trench or the other side of the road or something like that ahead of time. And that's true of... any utilities that are in a right-of-way by permit. They have to move when we come through to do improvements. Next slide. So I think Larry made a comment at the beginning of the presentation. And at this point, staff is recommending that we just continue to watch and maybe observe how this process is happening in Douglas County. You know, they are putting quite a bit of resource behind it. And so for us to kind of get to benefit from their experiences and expertises. And then we've kind of picked this time to revisit this in one year from now and to give some of these other state, some of these bodies in our state time to reflect and check in with them. Like Lakewood, for example, has a bunch of permits open, but they haven't been closed out yet. So what does that mean to us? Does that mean that landscaping isn't looking good? Does that mean the roads are not up to good shape? Does that just mean they're so far behind the paperwork isn't caught up? It doesn't mean a bad thing, but that's just a question mark that we want to fully understand. And I think at the end of this, as we've been talking about this now for a while, we were supposed to present like a month ago, so the question becomes that this is painful for the city. This is painful for the residents. But is that pain worth the benefits of high-speed fiber internet to the home? And so that's kind of... So our goals have been communicate what would it entail, how much effort's required, and then is all that effort worth the potential benefit to the residents and to the homeowners? That'd be the last slide. Probably the last slide. Okay, great. All right, so we have questions. Councilor Mulvey. Are we doing round robin? Yes, please. My concern is with the, first with the aesthetic, but the practical surface of the road, the impact. It's over by the shoulder. It's in an area where kids and people might ride their bikes. And so it looks that might be a process, what we were looking at. And would we end up with a smooth surface that doesn't have that declivity? The ceiling? Yeah, well, it looks like where the trench was, regardless of how it gets sealed, there's always some degree of declivity, breaking the pavement surface. Specifically, my question that has come up in one of the local meetings as well is I talked to That's a great question because I don't think a lot of people thought about that. But that could be a potential issue for sure. Can you please repeat that? I'm not sure I followed. So on the East Coast, I always have this reference to things that were done on the East Coast that may or may not work here. But where the trench is, you know how we have on Serena in our neighborhood, there's that like a curvy thing that's white? and it goes into the street, and then sometimes there's a gap there. Oh, yeah. So this would be like that. And I don't know the English word for it, but in my world of when there's an accident resulting from it, that disparate height in pavement was called the depravity. I don't know what the English word is for it. It's that space thing you could fall into or... Yeah, like a difference in height and you could have a little accident. Somebody would fall down and parents would complain and all of that business. Yeah, the height would be unaffected. So if the roadway was higher than the concrete pan, then it would still be that. But I think what your comment is, is it's a finishing. Yeah. They need to finish it well. and not just splatter out there and walk away when it sets up. So it does need to go through. That would be something that you would want criteria to manage and inspect it, is did it get finished well so it's finished smooth and it wouldn't catch an edge, it wouldn't grab a tire and cause you to, you know, get full. So in the contract. And as far as a trip hazard, I would not be concerned about that. Yeah. It's only, you know, and it's just finished smooth. So the trench is very, it's like almost like a saw cut. Most people wouldn't be wearing a heel there for sure. No, and you can get a heel in. I don't know much about it. You'd have to opt out for them. Yeah. Thank you, Mary. I don't know if I have a question much to comment. So I'm perfectly fine waiting. Excuse me. I was talking to the city manager earlier today and in a year from now, over the air, maybe just as fast as fiber. So I'm not in any rush to dig up, you know, trench streets. I guess that's my comment. I mean, personally, like, I know I think I pay too much for internet now, but my TV doesn't buffer. So I'm good with my speed. So I can't speak for all the residents. I'm just telling you personally, even my 5G, I can watch Netflix. So, you know, I do download some big files. But anyway, I'm just speaking selfishly. I'm okay waiting for a year because who knows what it will be like in a year. And good comment, because a lot happens in here and a lot of the initial setup of the engineering, where these micro trenches will be located, as well as setting up all the additional resources that the city would need to manage the construction and all the time, it takes, it's not going to be like an overnight thing. So. I'll just add one thing. And I just use as an example from city manager earlier today, My house was built in 2002. I have Cat5 and I have Ethernet in every room of my house. I have never used it. So I'm kind of using that analogy. Is there a worthwhile cost comparison? Is it cheaper to do microtransferring rather than do the normal, rip up the whole world and put it in something? That would be... the responsibility of the utility provider fully. So none of those costs would be put back onto the city. I think, sorry, I think part of that as well, the reason why this vendor is able to offer internet at all is because the micro-trenching is so much cheaper to install. It becomes cost-effective for them to go through all of that inconvenience, all the engineering, all the permitting, then to sell internet. I think if the vendor was only limited to open trenching or boring, which is so much more expensive, and it's not cost-effective, and there's no new vibrating salt. Okay. Thank you. Well, since it's a year out for us to even make a decision, I'm not going to really dwell on it. I will tell you that every time you use the words or a phrase like eats what? Threats or tears into our roads. I think it's what you said, tears into our roads. So considering how much money we put into those roads and the time and effort Larry has put into the roads, it makes my heart hurt. So the idea of tearing into those roads, tearing, oh my God, just hurts my soul. So putting it off for a little while, to Chris's point, for the new technology and so forth, I think it's worthwhile. I also, the only thing I've ever heard about our internet here in the city is, and well, throughout Colorado, maybe around the country, is make it cheaper. You know, every device is connected somehow to the internet, but making it cheaper, I hear more than faster. The question I have for you is, beyond cutting into our roads, which I think is probably foolhardy because of the weather that we have in Colorado, but what your pictures are showing here just shows one cut for a micro trench. What happens if another provider wants to come in and make a second cut or a third cut. Some of the pictures you showed from Lakewood are ugly as sin of their roads. I mean, it looks like my chest after heart surgery. It looks terrible. So what happens if, you know, multiple service providers want to come in and do multiple cuts? Are we not only digging up and destroying our roads, but with the weather conditions we have, aren't we opening ourselves up to having to replace roads even faster in our city? It's actually... We've actually talked about this quite a bit internally. And Mesa, Arizona, I think, finally published a spec of how they would want a second microtrench. And we can't totally answer your question except for our own opinion at this point. And I'll share it with mine because I'm not sure Larry agrees. But my thought on that is that the economics of a second microtrench don't make sense. That you have one vendor to come in. And in order for another vendor to want to come in and do a second micro-trench in a future time, which is more expensive generally in time, they have to have some sort of a business model that can offer faster or cheaper internet than the first provider did. It would be like putting Starbucks next to another coffee shop. There's only so much coffee that corner can sell. And so... I think if another vendor came to us, we would need to really talk about a specification or requirement or a concern about the road. But I also think the economics of it would take care of itself. Now, that's my... Just to add to that, do you realize how many coffee shops are within walking distance of right here? How many Starbucks are within walking distance of right here? Thank you for your answers. I don't need to make light of that. That's a great question because... You know, for the economics point of it, once there's one trench, if another trench does want to come in, I think economically it would be challenging for another vendor to go because, you know, you have to go underneath that trench, right? So how many cards can you have before? It's too much. Well, and additionally, you have to have a second set of handholds. You have to have a second set of those boxes in your yard. And at a certain point, you're just your whole landscaping is these boxes. I agree. I just think at a certain point, it doesn't happen. It gets down to first in, first in only, and perhaps. Maybe let's hear Larry's alternative point of view that you mentioned. No, he's actually also going to do support what he said in the conversations I've had with different people that are involved in this around the state. They're all saying you won't see two providers come in. It's just not a 20-minute. This is not, whether it's microtrenched or in the back, it doesn't matter. None of it's cheap. So that's one of the things we've heard. So when they come in to have to do repairs, are they actually accessible just through that microtrench, or are they going to have to cut up the road significantly more to make a repair? Or is that unknown? No, from what we understand. So that's the different kind of repairs. So if there was an accidental cutting of it, right, they have sensors that know approximately where it would be. They would come on site and they would need to dig up 18 inches, depending on the extent of the damage. If they showed up and some utility contractor just went right through and tore the whole thing up, that's a more extensive repair. If they get and they have one of the handholds, just the connection is loose, I'm going to willy-nilly, then they can come in there and just fix that. So I don't think that if there's an issue, it's just a total rip the road up. I mean, they're only 8 to 12 inches deep, so they would focus on that. And then the repair, who knows how big that would be. That would need to be filled back in. That would need to be troweled and smooth and matched. They would still use that same darker, groutish, high-strength polymer and go on their way. And keep in mind, all repairs would be hard. you know, it would be the responsibility of the utility company to whatever the repair is, whatever, you know, that's, whatever it affects in our, the city's rent-of-way, it would be their responsibility too. So it wouldn't be a city cost, if that makes sense. Thank you, Mayor. So one of the original slides mentioned something to the effect that the city couldn't lease fiber or something like that. So a couple of things. One is, if I'm correct, is it Commerce City that has the line as big? Because I know looking at the city manager a couple of years ago, that was one of, for everyone listening, the city's not considering being an internet service provider. But in that situation, I don't want to mislead anyone because it's not doing this. The city could be an ISP, install this microtrench ourselves, and sell the internet service. So when you say the city can't lease it, with that qualification, am I correct? Go back to the first slide, or the first slide, and we'll follow. But I repeat, City is not considering being an ISP. That's up to us. Well, today. So there's, Mayor, I mean, so to answer Councilmember Eubank's question there, across Colorado, there's numerous ways that municipalities have done it. There are some that actually are the ISP. and run it themselves, and they are the internet service provider. There are some who have put in the conduit and then leased that conduit because they put in enough infrastructure that they lease it. Ting is an example locally in Centennial that is operated that way. I think Longmont, Fort Collins run their own ISP. There's probably a couple others. I could be wrong on that. So there's the spectrum of what we could do. In Castle Pines, we started putting in the conduit with the idea that if we could get ahead enough of the demand that somebody might come in and be interested in leasing that conduit from us. After we put the run that you were referring to earlier that runs up Legay over Monarch and up, I'm sorry, up Legay or CBP up Monarch, that run. We were really told by the providers that they are ahead of us and the cost isn't sufficient for them not to take their standard approach to doing it. So we stopped putting in the conduit infrastructure based on the providers all telling us, really, we're never going to use that from you. So we still have that conduit in there and maybe it'll be used sometime in the future, but that's where we are. Did that... So are you saying we put it in for nothing at the end of the day? At this point, yeah. I mean, we keep bringing it up to all the providers, and ultimately if there is another provider that comes into town, they will probably want to lease that. I mean, it will be a negotiation. They'll have to decide is the long-term cost of leasing versus the upfront capital cost worth it for them. That brings to mind a – thank you for answering the question. That brings to mind a follow-up. You asked me a question. I know. So I have a follow-up after that when you're done. So, yes, it does answer my question sort of, but that's what I'm thinking is down the road with a conduit that's already installed being an option instead of micro-trenching for a different provider. For that stretch. For that stretch. Absolutely. Yep. Thank you. Oh, I'm good. Okay. Thank you. We went in like too many spiderwebs on that. So my question is, Related to that, because I'm wondering who came in and thought about all this. We're ahead of the game. We're thinking about it. That's the right thing to do. It's proactive. But what company is looking to do this now? Did somebody come to us? Is somebody committed? That's a question for anybody who can answer it. And in silence, I'm understanding no. Well, we're trying to be agnostic about the company. and not have this conversation be about the company, but the policy question is around allowing microtrenching and not the company itself. Well, don't tell me what I can decide. Yes. How about that? Yes. All right. My question is, is there a provider who has come in and asked us for this and is committed enough to what we would ask? I would say the former has asked whether or not committed Not sure of that. We actually have potentially two providers that are interested. One is further ahead, and they are not interested in microtrenching. They're interested in the standard boring installation. And that goes to what the gentleman was speaking of, that I think somewhat this is, to be very direct, this is a race to put in the infrastructure because we would anticipate that the one company that installs, you're not going to end up with three or four companies in an area of roughly 4,000 units, the competition just isn't there as Dole was speaking to. So from a priority standpoint, the company that does the normal boring is ahead and is already working on an agreement that we would bring to council. I think it comes to council. And then there's a secondary company that is interested in using the microtouching technology, but they are not as committed in Has it worked to the depth that the standard company has? Okay. So long answer. I get the answer is two potentially, and they're not committed. And only one is micro-transition. One is very committed and not interested in micro-transition. Okay. So that's... So I think we should try to compare them in the same place. Because if we put in infrastructure... For microtrenching, that would convey that we're preferring the one or the other, necessarily, in my mind. Not looking for an answer there. I'm stating that. That would definitely give that impression. So that concerns me. The related question is, have any residents asked for this? Not recently. I want to say it was a couple of years ago. It could have been even three or four years ago now that we received a couple inquiries out of, hey, when are we going to get 5G in our community? We're looking for higher speeds, lower costs, those types of things, but not in the recent recorded history. Thank you. We have a couple more follow-up questions when the time is appropriate. Go ahead, Chris. Thank you, Mary. Ron, do you want to go ahead? Corey. Hello, Corey. Well, let me ask my question so that way I know that. So if we are saying, Council Member Mulvey is saying we should talk about the two options. If we're suggesting we do nothing for a year, does that nothing for a year, including the boring company? Not to be confused with the boring company? No, they're not. They're usually exclusive. Correct. Okay. And the companies are not going to flip on their type of installation? One does micro, and that's how their form of financials work. The other does the other. If you can imagine where I'm going with this, if we're saying we're delaying a conversation about microtrenching for a year, but there's a potential employer doing it traditionally, maybe that's what you were saying, Council Member Moby, that we should be looking at both at the same time, not waiting a year for one. Am I making any sense? Totally, 100%. Yeah, I'm thinking that if we're tracking them differently or as you put it, prioritizing, that would convey something about a preference that we might want to be careful of and think twice about. So just in the context of this conversation, we're only talking about micro-trenching here. I understand that. So it's because the original, you know, the traditional method has been used It is being used. So really, this whole concept of microtrenching and the sort of uncertainties are what we're trying to bring here. Yeah, just we want to keep a focus on this type of trenching, which is very different than traditional utility installation. I see your perspective. So it's our job to kind of take it to the next level. step, and that's why we're going there. So I appreciate that. Thank you. Go ahead, Joel, and then I'm going to let Corey ask her question. Thank you. So two things. A good municipality is always installing conduit when they're opening up the road. Even if there isn't a big vision for it yet, to throw a couple of sticks of PVC in the ground and get the road torn up and the back fell, it's the cheapest it'll ever go. It's the fastest it has to do anything. So the city was really smart to be even without a vision, just like throwing conduit out there because who knows where, because once it gets buried, the cost to put it back in is very expensive, obviously. And then the second thing is a utility company could come in tomorrow and request permitting to go and start doing and song boring to run internet to the house. That's currently allowed and permitted and it just hasn't, they haven't done it yet. So there is another possibility provider, as Michael mentioned, who wants to do that, but with microtrenching. So as Jay said, this focuses really on how does the city feel about microtrenching, because the boring process is already allowed. It's already per, and it's part of the utility agreement and that kind of thing. So the question is really, how do we feel about permitting for it, allowing a permit for it? For which one? Microtrenching. Well, that's what we would be discussing. If that were to be approved, then we would need to think through the criteria and the communication, but I think it would, it would be permitted very similarly to any utility company coming into our way in a year. I think I'm let's, let's hear. Thank you. Sorry. I couldn't be in person, but I will eventually soon. I'm just confused about not, I just want to know maybe some of the background and maybe this because I'm newer, I don't know the background. So. these providers come, they offer a service. So that's, and then it's up to the citizens of the community or if they decide to opt into that service and pay for that service. So I'm not quite clear about what you mentioned. It would take more city resources, more employees. Like how does that all work if it's just a utility provider coming in because they want to generate some income off of providing a service and then each community member can decide if they want to opt in and pay for that service. I'm not quite sure I understand the city's role. I understand the role about permitting, but is that where you see the city taking on more, needing more employees or time and money? That's my question. Sure, good question. So we'll go backwards in your questions. The provider basically takes a gamble that they're gonna come in and install this infrastructure and then they're gonna have a certain number of residents that want their service. It could be possible that the vendor could come in and install hook up 4,000 homes to Fiverr and not have a single person sign up, and that vendor would lose a significant amount of money. Now, they're savvy, they're smart, so they're doing analysis, they know what the existing incumbent, their prices are, their speed, so they have a high level of confidence that when they came in, they would get a certain adoption rate that made the math work for them. Now, the second part of your question was referring to the city resource needs, and what we're referring to is primarily reviewing the permits, and then managing the construction of the micro-trenching to make sure that they've communicated properly, that the trenches are – and primarily that they're getting finished and looking nice. It's just we don't have the ability to just turn them loose and let them kind of go crazy in the city. So we would want to have some review, some oversight, and that oversight – the city is not budgeted for. So you charge the vendor to provide. Very similar to what we do for inspections on the east side about how the home builders pay for the inspections and acceptances we do on the east side. So that's what I mean by city staff needs is primarily during construction and rollout. Thank you. That helps. Appreciate it. Thank you for seeing that. Staff needs different than the needs... as a regular utility provider that comes in and does the right-of-way dig up, and you already have the standards there. Again, the micro-trenching is specific to this roadways. When they did put that conduit in, we had a full-time inspector out there every day with them to monitor that conduit all the way from the gate and on. So, yeah, that's the kind of things we're talking about. This is even higher than that because it's not just the conduit. It's also... these micro trenches are doing and the feedback we're just not hearing good things right so um yeah so oh i think it would be i think it would potentially be more inspection work because when they're when they're boring they're going underground and popping back up so they have more pits and um micro trenching would impact every every linear foot or residential roadway in the neighborhood in the communities so on both sides on both sides So I do think there would be more, but that would be factored into the permit and the permit fees and the providers doing this all over the country so they're used to this kind of stuff. Are you saying it can only be done in a large scale? I don't know about that. I think it could be done on a small scale, but my point is the vendor, they have to get high-speed internet. They have to tie into a node somewhere. They have to run to this. They have to design all this stuff. So they have a major... upfront cost, there's some number that they have to sell 1,500 homes per square, I'm making this numbers up, but they have to, exactly, to make it worth it to them. I get it. Yeah. Go ahead, Roger. Thanks. And of course, we've been talking about the roads, which is my interest, but this was going to be put in near me, and I had one of these vaults or handholds in my yard. Castle Island's really funny about our cars. This would really bother me. I see a real problem with that. How far apart are they, and how do you choose which yard is the lucky camper to get one of these really ugly concrete things inside of their yard? You go to your neighbor and you write papers inside. No, so... Play dice? Where the right-of-way is, right? The other utility. Well, yeah. Yeah, and so as we talked about, if you think about it, both houses always have their utility cabinets on the same side where water comes in, that kind of stuff. So that's the side of the house. So you don't get to choose which side of your house it would come in on, but it would be between every other. Wow. Yeah, so every other – so there's two houses, and then you have boxes, and then it would skip. That's a lot. It's a lot. It's a significant amount of effort for them to do this. So that's the point, is that they are spending a lot of money with the hope that enough people sign up for their service that they make money in the future. Go ahead, Monty. Just an observation or comment. As I stop back from the East Coast, southern West Virginia, the cities and municipalities back there are urging their people to go Starlink. They'll pay half the cost to the antenna, which means you have a cookie sheet about 12 by 12 in your backyard, and a cable run from that. I'm not sure what the problem is. They have some sort of horrific problem building roads back there, and they don't want to tear them up once they're done. So even the smallest towns, I mean, I come out of a town with 700 people, and the city will pay for half of your installation. And that's gigabit speed, right? And so it gets better and better. My last question, I promise, so just to be very clear, if micro-trenching occurs, regardless if any household ever says, I'd like this service, every other yard will have a box, just by virtue of saying yes to micro-trenching. That's true of anything that comes in. All of them do, and there was the community of Diverless, and it's a very good example of that, where electrics on every other one, and then you know, the other providers are at the opposite ones. And so just because there's so much, so much there. So no matter what, and just so you know, Michael and I over the whole past six years have probably talked to a half a dozen providers. Usually what we found out in the end is they couldn't get, they couldn't get power. They couldn't get the service they needed to do what they are. or most of them have come in and it's generally a trench because sometimes also these are the homes that have utilities in the front. A lot of them, there's a lot of homes here where the micro trench is the utilities are in the back. And so they're coming in. Yeah, so that's one of the downsides to both communities. But again, the micro trenching is, I have not, everything I can tell you, we had a public service a couple of years ago about micro trenching in the streets and it was unanimous. all the other news pilots said no. So it's not a popular thing. And like you said, if there's a second provider, then how do we set up the standards to do that? Then we've got two small cracks in our road. Am I correct? Yeah. I'm prepared to give my comment. So I appreciate the looking forward part of this and the study of it. I have the same concerns about the impact the road not not necessarily the aesthetics because whatever it's more people using the road and wanting your people who are using the road to use the side of the road not the center of the road for their bicycle especially when it's on a curvy hill rather um i also have concerns about boxes the handheld boxes because it is another thing in the yard um And I have experienced that back east when Fios went in and did this in our neighborhood. So I get it. There's an upside and a downside. But what I do see the value in is exploring through the next year when there's for time if what our permitting might look like. There's no harm in us being prepared by listing out in some fashion on your end what it is we would insist a vendor or a requester to put in an upfront cost. And that has to include communication with the neighbors, the neighborhood, to see, do you want this? It has to include nice finish, all of the things that you mentioned. But to me, it does make sense to be prepared because when we get a choice or somebody come in, then we can make a decision. more swiftly. But I do not agree with proceeding on a mass basis of just doing the whole thing because we think somebody might come in and it'll be really good. I totally disagree with that. I don't want to waste staff time on something we're going to do in a year where we don't know what the technology looks like or even if we're going to want to do this. I think there's the first vote if this is a yes or no, and then we can let staff, yeah. What? I didn't hear what Chris said. I would want to say if we even were interested in this in a year, before we put staff to work on it, I don't want to waste anybody's time. And it sounds like they've done a lot of research already that I wasn't aware of every time. Skinning wheels on it until we decided this is what we wanted to do. Frankly, I don't want to cut off our rest. But whoever is sitting in my council seat and here for now, they'll have to vote. So back to the question, staff proposed that we wait a year on this. Is anyone currently opposed to waiting a year on this? No. No. No. Okay. I think you guys have what you need from us. Thank you very much. And we will return for our regular business meeting at 630. Thank you. Okay, there we go. We are good now. All right. Sorry for the slight delay. We have some technical problems. Go ahead and call this meeting to order. Good evening, Council, citizens and staffs. I call the June 10, 2025 City Council meeting to order at 6.33 p.m. Deputy Clerk Goins, will you please call the roll? Mayor Ingram? Here. Mayor Pro Tem Eubanks. Here. Council Member Mulvey. Here. Council Member Cole. Here. Council Member Salazar. Here. Here. Council Member Blue. Here. Council Member Hudson. Here. Madam Mayor, you are informed. Thank you very much. Everyone, please rise and join me for the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Before we move on to our agenda, I just wanted to talk about some protocol. I reviewed some of our videos. I was just trying to find some ways that we could improve to make sure we didn't lose anyone's voices in our conversations. And sometimes we have some challenge where we're speaking over top of each other. And I just wanted to review one item because I think that it might help us in that case. When we do clients in order, The process for points of order is that the member makes the point of order, and then the chair needs to acknowledge the point of order and say, please state your point. And a lot of times we're moving right from the point of order to stating the point, and we need to make sure we have a pause in there. It just kind of helps level everything and make sure everyone else can stop talking. And then once the point of order is made, And the chair says, please state your point. Then the member would say, you know, point of order, mayor, the room's too cold. Can we please turn the heat on? Would be an accept. And so then the chair would then state point well made or point well taken or point not well taken. And so then at that point, if it was well taken, the chair would then proceed to correct the issue which okay let's turn and throw the stab up and then we move on so the big piece is we just want to make sure that we leave the pause in there to wait for the acknowledgement of please state your point and also then please walk pause and wait for the ruling of the chair before proceeding and i think that will help to make sure that we don't have any over talking over each other may i be recognized yes counselor i really appreciate you doing that i think it's helpful um Would it be helpful also to let folks know that if they dispute the ruling, that they can appeal it right then and there? Yes, you can have the chair rules. If you don't agree, depending on what the appeal is, you can ask the chair for immediate appeal. That's the only time you actually can appeal, is immediately upon the ruling. All right, any other questions on that? I just think that will help us. All right, we will move on to the approval of our agenda. If there are no objections, the agenda will be approved. Hearing none, the agenda is approved as presented. Next, we have public comment. Public comment is designed for you to share your thoughts and concerns with City Council, but it's not an interactive discussion. If you are attending tonight's meeting virtually and would like to give general public comment, please sign up by typing your name and address into the chat feature. If you're attending in person, please sign up on the clipboard in the back of the room. If you have called into tonight's meeting, the clerk will recognize you by the last four digits of your phone number. And wait a moment to give the clerk a moment to check to see if you have anyone signed up in the back of the room or online. So it looks like we do have someone. Hang on. Okay. Let me go ahead and do the additional instructions. So anyone that has signed up, if you are speaking as an individual, you will have three minutes to speak. If you are speaking on behalf of a group, you have five minutes to speak. There will be lights that are used over here by the clerk that will signify that your green is good, yellow is letting you know that you're almost out of time, and red is you need to stop. And clerk, have I missed anything for the additional instructions? I think that's all. Okay, oh, you need to make sure that you also state your name and address for the record when you approach the mic. And make sure that the mic's group light is green, so that way we can hear you and your report. All right, so go ahead and name our first speaker, please. Eric Brody. Yes, my name is Eric Brody. I live at 7458 Manchester Court. Item 8A on your agenda night is the Home Rule. presentation. I look forward to watching the recording of that, but I cannot stay for it. But I did want to register my opposition to this initiative. It's very regrettable to me that so much has already been infested by the county, Douglas County, in rushing this home rule election at great cost. But additionally, the problem with it being so rushed is more substantial. we have such a very short time for the community to consider what the Home Rule Commission, once elected, if elected, will have to even generate an appropriate Home Rule Charter for us to vote for in November. So I'm highly skeptical of the motivations of those government officers, the members of the Douglas County Commission, who have pushed us forward in such great haste, and I think a great cause to public trust. and to the effective consideration of this monumental proposal. So again, my statements are brief. I'll end it there. I look forward to watching the presentation later. Thank you very much. I'm Annette Budd. I'm here from Congresswoman Boebert's office. If you aren't aware, we moved our office just really not far from here up the street. If you know where Lincoln Station is, the bridge that goes over the interstate, our office is attached to that bridge or to the car garage that's attached to that bridge. First of all, I'm here because I want to make you aware that we are really here to help and support you. If there's anything that we could do, please reach out to us. I have cards that I'll give to someone over here, I assume, when I'm done. So I was looking at some Douglas County projects that we've requested for congressional-directed spending for recently. There's a $5 million project we've requested for a pipeline for Castle Rock Water, which be a pipeline that's capable of transferring up to 1,000 acre feet of water per year and will be used to store water in the reservoir. So it's available to meet the needs in the significant drought, as well as the high demands in the summer and the fall. Also, a Highway 85 widening project right there in Castle Rock, Sedalia. I'm sure you're all familiar with that area. And then another, Louvre's Water and Sanitation District, $4 million for that. So we are really wanting to be here to support you. please reach out to us if there's anything you can do. And I'm just going to be here to take notes and report back on what's going on with you guys. But don't hesitate to reach out to us. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Do we have anyone else signed up online? Nobody online and nobody called in. All right. Perfect. Thank you very much. All right. We will move on to our presentation of our minutes. Are there corrections to the minutes for the June 10th, 2020 Vice City Council meeting? Hearing none, the minutes will be moved as presented. Next is our consent agenda. Tonight's consent agenda is ordinance number 25-05, which vacates the Canyonside subdivision filing number two, first amendment on first reading. and Ordinance 25-09, which amends Section 11-1-10 and 11-1-20 of the Municipal Code concerning maintenance of sidewalks on first reading. May I have a motion for the items on the consent agenda, please? Madam Mayor, I move to approve the items on the consent agenda. Second. A motion and a second. Clerk Boyce, will you please call the vote? Mayor Ingerman? Yes. Council Member Mulvey? Yes. Council Member Pol? Yes. Council Member Salazar? Yes. Council Member Hudson? Yes. Council Member Eubanks? Yes. The vote passes. Thank you. Right, moving on to our general business. On tonight's general business is the Douglas County Home Rule presentation brought to you by County Attorney Jeff Garcia. As per normal, our protocols, please allow him to finish his presentation, and then we will move into clarifying questions, which I can give some more instructions once we get to that point. All right. We'll invite you, Attorney Garcia, to the podium for your presentation. Thank you. Thanks for having me. I'm not familiar with the room. I did send a PowerPoint. No, they've got it right there. Just say next slide. I became a county attorney about two and a half years ago, and I've had the opportunity to meet some of you, but I haven't had the opportunity to meet all of you, so it's really nice to be invited to the room. So it's a lovely venue, and I just want to thank you for having me today. So I'd like to give a presentation on that home rule. And it's going to be strictly informational. There's no advocacy in this. I'm just going to talk about the law and give information about where we are in the process and what that process may look like going forward. I believe this is the 21st time that I've given a presentation about a home rule. So I've had a hair practice. One of the first things I think about when I give a presentation like this is not only the education, but maybe I'm talking about the audience I'm talking to. So I'd like, before I even start the presentation, I'd like to give a little bit of information and maybe address some of the elephants in the room, if there's such a thing. The county's home rule is significantly different than municipal home rule. So your home rule city, it's a little bit different. The home rule counties are different, and they are still governed significantly by the state. And so it isn't the same experience that you may have in a home rule city. In addition to... By statute, home rule counties do not change the operation of a municipality, a home rule municipality. The authority that's gained by the county becoming home rule does not affect its relationship with its home rule municipalities, such as yourself. Existing contracts, commitments, elected officials, employees, those aren't going to change with home rule. So there will be some differences and there'll be some difference in governance, but those things that have already been committed or that people have been elected, that's not going to change. In addition to, it doesn't directly affect things like incorporation. We can't make anyone incorporate who's not otherwise incorporated. Annexation, those are separate laws that have nothing to do with home rule and aren't being discussed in any meeting that I've ever been a part of. In addition, I think we've had questions about state funding. Will this change state funding? It should not. There's simple laws and there's some lawsuits about that to make sure that the state funding that exists today as a statutory county continues as a rural county. So hopefully that addresses some of the interaction that might exist between the county and the city in that regard. With that being said, can we start the presentation? I'm going to go to slide one, please. So let's talk where we are today. As of today, there are only four home rule counties. Weld County and Pitkin are the only strictly counties that are home rule. Denver and Broomfield are municipalities and counties. So there are cities and counties that are home rule. The other 16, including Douglas County, are what you call a statutory county. Or that is to say, they've submitted to the regulation of the states. They haven't done the extra work to become a home rule county. All the incorporated municipalities in Douglas County are Home Rule, so they've done that extra step to have that level of self-governance, have that additional authority. Why don't we move forward a little bit? So there are some distinct advantages to becoming a Home Rule county. You get to distinguish yourself from the state in that regard. I have a similar benefit. Voters have the right to petition for change. So when I talked about that, there is nothing at the county level to edit at the moment. So there's no charter to change. There's no petition to go forward and say, I want this to be different. If Home Rule takes effect, there will be a document. There will be a charter, for lack of a better word or common understanding, a constitution for the county that... interested individuals can come and say, you know, I don't like this and I want to get my signatures together and I want this to be changed. So it really is giving a voice to the people that doesn't exist at the moment. There's opting out of state regulation. I'll get into that in more detail. But it's important to remember that we retain all of the authority that exists today as a statutory county. So if tomorrow we became a home rule county, all the authority that we had today would still be in place. So the statutory county authority is still there. You do obtain some very specific Home Rule County authority that only exists for those counties who've done the extra work to become a Home Rule County. You get to design the government of that county. So those are the individuals who are appointed versus elected, the number of commissioners. Denver has 13. We currently have three. All of that gets discussed. And then you get to create unique laws for the needs of Douglas County. And I think that's important because if you look at the home row counties, what is occurring in Aspen and what their needs are are different than what's needed at Broomfield versus what's different and needed in Douglas County. So let's move forward now and talk a little bit about the disadvantages of it. So there are two countywide elections that are required. This is by statute. And those require a great deal of work for our clerk and recorder's office to mail those ballots out and to get involved in that. there's a lot of work in actually creating the charter after that June 24th election. If the voters decide to move forward with this, there's a great deal of work that needs to be done to get a charter drafted. And then after that's done, there's frequently challenges to that charter. If you read about the county, we do already get challenged on some of our laws. We get sued occasionally. So we know that this will be an additional level of work, but it's... work that my office would take on so if there's questions about you know litigation costs maybe other counties uh hire out their attorneys we don't we have a full staff so the legal resources within our county would be dedicated so there would not be additional litigation costs And then the other one that's really important to see the disadvantage of is that there's a lot of misunderstanding about this. This isn't a traffic ordinance. This isn't a zoning reg that we use frequently. The last time this was used was about 50 years ago, and it's not something that comes up. If you can look at the number of the cases on this. You can read them in an afternoon. There's just not a lot of law on this. And because it's infrequently used, people tend to misunderstand it. And I want to be here today to help you all understand it. And so when you speak to your constituents, you can say, well, yeah, this is how it works. And I know you have a wonderful attorney in London who would probably help you in this regard as well. So let's move forward one more slide. So the process. In 1970, the state constitution was changed, Article 14, Section 16, was changed to allow counties to have that same ability to become home rule that municipalities did. The big restriction when I talk about the difference between a county and a municipality in this regard is that all of the functions of the county that are directed or guided or mandated by the state, you still have to provide. So there's a lot less freedom in the things that you need to do or that you can stop doing. But it is still, it's a unique situation that only two other counties have done because of the work and the resources dedicated to it. But I think it is something that it could be worth the county doing with some of those powers that I'm gonna discuss. There's a nine step process to become a Home Rule County. And then it requires a 21 member charter commission. So representatives of the community, three at large, six from each district, must be elected and represent their communities. That will be a 21 charter commission, and I'll talk a little bit more about how that works. Let's move forward one more slide. So I want to talk about schedule. So the county wants to be very fiscally conservative about this. So the goal would be to get this done between the 24th of June and the next general election. There's a bunch of statutory guidelines in that, but that's not a hard line, and that's not... something you have to do. In the event that that goes longer and this becomes something that the community really gets involved in, it becomes a larger conversation, we can go to a special election next year, and that would be a possibility as well. So this is the timeframe that exists to make it to that general election to save the county additional funds. That's not the goal of this. The goal of this isn't to save the county funds. The goal of this is to create a charter that's truly representative of the needs that are unique to Douglas County. That being said, can this be done? Absolutely. So you have a 70-day period where 21 people are working to start with this. Pickett County, about a year. Pickett County started with a blank piece of paper. We wouldn't be starting with blunt piece of paper. We could look at Pitkin and Weld, and that would be a good starting point. Also, it was done 50 years ago. So 50 years ago, things were a little bit different. There was no internet. There was no cell phones. There was no team meetings. There was no one able to watch me online. So things were quite a bit different, and I think there are some big advantages to it. I also think that you should think about what a charter size of a document that looks like. The Lincoln Charter is 45 pages. The Weld County Charter is 50 pages. I might have actually reversed those. But it's approximately 50 pages. Can your staff, think about this, can your staff put together a 50-page document in 70 days? I guarantee you they can. Can they get the public engagement? That's going to be the trick. I'm going to talk to you about how public engagement is going to be really important in this and that it really will be a period of crunch time. Let's move one slide forward more. So two steps have already occurred. The very first step is there is a resolution to adopt this. So to kick this off. And on March 25th, there was a resolution by the Board of County Commissioners to flip this off. I will say that this is not a new thought. This was not something that just they decided to do on March 25th. Actually, the first day I came into the office for my interview, one of the commissioners asked me this. And we've talked about it in legal updates. for years, so this has been something. As we've gotten involved in lawsuits or we have challenges to the county, one of the frequent questions is, would Home Rule help with this? And sometimes it wouldn't, sometimes it wouldn't, but that'd be a conversation we had. But it literally started to happen, this conversation at my interview. And then the second element of this is we had to divide the county into divisions to create those three at-large members to be voted on, and then six for each division. As a matter of... convenience and understanding, they kept them the same as your commissioner districts. So if you're a commissioner district, one, you're going to vote for that. Two, make it as easy as possible for people to understand. One of the criticisms or things that have been talked about is that there was some kind of open meetings violation that occurred and created this. We've went to court. I went to court on this twice. We've had a hearing on this. the state court has said, you did not violate open meetings a lot. There has not been a failure of transparency in this. And that's important for individuals to know, because sometimes we have things shouted out to the public, but the ultimate end decision is that we did not violate any of these non-chat laws in creating this. So let's move forward one more. So, The first election will be on June 24th. That election, some of you, I'm not actually sure, that all of you probably already received your ballot on that. That ballot is going to have three questions on it. The first question is, should we create a Home Rule Charter Commission to do a comprehensive study of the county and create a charter? And then if you decide to do that, you get to, regardless of how you vote on that question, you have to vote on the other two questions. It's who are the members of that charter commission? At large, there'll be three at-large members, so everyone gets to fill out three boxes on that, regardless of where you live, and then six members from your district. Most districts, I think, have their meeting in 12, and you'll be able to fill in six boxes. So if you're talking to a neighbor or a constituent and they're curious, because the ballot does look a little different than you may have seen at their ballots, they can fill in six. There are instructions on the ballot, but sometimes we all get asked those kind of questions. The question that comes up is why are we doing a special election? And then how is that being paid for? And so first of all, let's talk about the special election. In statute, the statute that's shown right there, it contemplates the special election as one of the two. You could go general election to general election. However, the county believed that the period of time to have the commission start working on this was now that there would be a time to get this voting forward. And they wanted those 21 members in the public to start working on that today. They felt there was a need of things that the county could benefit from and that the benefit of that would be the value of the election. The price of that election isn't still complete. It's probably somewhere between $300,000 and $500,000. So we'll solve that when everything's said and done. But that being said, the question about where that money comes from, there's a line item budget that exists for special elections. Some years we use it, some years we don't. So that is a budget item that occurs. So we had a plan for this. We didn't go stop building a road or fire a tentative for this. This was something that was contemplated as a possibility. So let's move forward one more slide. After the 24th election, they'll seat a Charter Commission of 21 at the first meeting. They'll elect officers. They'll schedule meetings, and they'll adopt rules. All of the meetings of the Charter Commission are subject to open meeting laws. All their documents are subject to GORA. All the sunshine laws that you're all very used to, all the transparency that occurs is going to be there for this group like it is any other group. And this group is completely distinct. This is a new group that's going to exist. So it won't be given direction by myself or the Board of County Commissioners or anyone else. This is its only entity with a very narrow job writing that charter and having the interaction and contact with the community and bringing those ideas back together. Now, some of those members of the 21 program have a lot of ideas themselves or have been talking to the community and want to bring those ideas forward. but it's not strictly on them to do that. It's on every member of Douglas County who has thoughts about how they would like to live and under what documents and what laws they would like to live under. And as of today, right now, any one living in Douglas County, outside of Douglas County can do this too, can go to our website. You go to the Douglas County website, you go into the right corner, type in home rule. It'll take you to just a... Huge amount, huge amount of information about home growth. But if you scroll down to the bottom of it, you'll see that little box that I put up in this slide. And it is the comments or thoughts or ideas or questions you have that you want to go to that 21 member commission. So when Weld County did theirs, they had 36 meetings, public engagements. As I said, I think this is 21 for me. So are we going to get to 36? Absolutely. Because there's a bunch of statutory ones that we have to have as well. But in addition to that, Anytime someone has an idea, maybe it's something unique to them or their needs. I had an individual who worked in the insurance industry and said, hey, I really like this. I think this is important. It would make insuring individuals and Douglas better. If we had this, jump on the Internet, put it on the web page, and that information will be given to those 21 members. It can be 2 o'clock in the morning. It can be on your lunch break, whenever you have an infinite amount of time to let them know what you need and what you want. In subsequent meetings, they will work on a draft. Those drafts will be made public. Drafts of the charter will be on the website. There'll be links through social media. And then when we get to a final little bit later, closer to the end draft, that will be published in a newspaper. And that's all statutory requirements. We want to make it as easy as possible for people to understand what's going on and what these changes might look like. An interesting one, and I think it's probably a dated one, but it's one that's really important for some of our members who don't want to have an internet link to the Charter of Admission, but want to see them, want to come in and talk to them. There will be three meetings required for public comment. They're statutorily required meetings. They should be 15 minutes. They can be 15 hours. Anyone who wants to come in and talk to the 21 members about what they want... and what they think is important or special and what they want to preserve about Douglas County can come and do that. So at those meetings, and I anticipate those will be very long meetings, you can come in and just have that conversation with the Charter Commission. Let's move forward one more. So a final draft will be approved by the Charter Commission if certain legal requirements are met. The Board of County Commissioners will move that forward to a second election. At that second election, It will be a countywide election again. And that won't be a menu type approach. That will be, this is the charter. You've all had a chance to look at it. You've all had a chance to read it. It won't be, I like section A, so I want to vote for section A, but not section B. It will be, does the community want to support this? And I think there's a high level of accountability to that. So if someone decided to put something really outlandish in there, well, that would be a reason that some people might vote to kill the whole thing. And so it's going to be really important to get to that middle road when you get that charter, because you're not voting for just the one thing that that one person likes, but it's the whole thing. So there will be some consensus-making, if that makes sense, after that second election, if it's adopted. And it is in the general election. It will be January of the following year that we will count. Let's move forward one more. Move forward one more. Oh, thank you. I saw you on the phone. I was like, dude, this guy's not even listening. He just said nobody's texting. I'm like, you're not in charge. So there are four ways that this will benefit or will give additional authority to the county. The first off is all the explicit statutory authority. So there are statutes that say home rule counties get to do this and statutory counties don't get to do it. The first important one is about mandatory functions. So those things that we're asked to do today, we still have to do tomorrow and we're still empowered to do them tomorrow. So we have sheriff's department today, we'll have sheriff's department the day after Home Rule takes effect. Human services, all those things that are told to us that this is the function of a county. The structure of the government, again, that's how the government operates and works. So if you look at a lot of those other charters, you'll see what their departments are. or who their elected officials are. And some of them have maybe an appointed surveyor instead of an elected surveyor. That will be all up to the Charter Commission. And then there's a different right to contract. So this comes up. And I don't know how frequently it will come up, but it's a unique one for us because a few years ago we got into a lawsuit with the state because they said we didn't have a separate contract from them when it came to ICE enforcement. And they said you can't make a contract with ICE. The federal government, and we're still in an ongoing lawsuit about that, because you don't have separate right to contract. And this will not be an all-out answer to that, but it does give us one more argument saying that we've taken the steps necessary to say we are a separate legal entity in certain circumstances. So I'm not saying it would have voided that lawsuit, but it may have helped in any earlier disposition of lawsuit. Let's move forward one more. So under 3035-201, it lists 47 different authorities of the county that are increased in some way. These are not requirements. These 47 do not appear in the pit can weld. Some of them do. Some of them don't. One of the things we might talk about is the speed of creating something like this. A lot of the work that will be done is reserving these rights. Like in the future, we might need this. But right now... We're just saying that we're reserving the right to use it in the future. But again, all of these do not appear in the other two counties. And it will be up to the 21 Commission and the public to talk about which of these are important for Douglas County. Let's move forward one more. So what I just talked about were the things that you could do additionally after your home goal. What I want to talk about now is explicit statutory acceptance. Things that you don't have to do. Things that you don't have to follow. If you follow us, the news we had two years ago, we had the organization come in and try to um unionize the sheriff's department there there was a several things that didn't work out well with that but one of them was that under the new copco law the collective bargaining for county employees it shifted the direction of the sheriff's deputies from the sheriff to the board of county commissioners so things like discipline, things like compensation benefits. Those were being moved from that elected official that our public had elected Darren Weakley to do that job. It was moving it. Those decisions were being moved. And we didn't like that. We thought we really wanted to keep Darren in charge and make sure that Sheriff Weakley had the authority to do those things. We got to a legal argument with them. And we wouldn't have had to get in that legal argument. because there's a law that says you don't have to follow COPCA if you're a home rule county. And that's not the only law. Last year, there were four additional laws that were passed, but every session, there's more laws that come out and say, this doesn't apply to home rule. And it's usually because Denver, Groomfield, Bell County can say, I don't want this, and they're lobbying for it, and we would benefit from that. So that's one of them. There's some tax caps, unfunded mandates, local election laws. Those are just a few examples of things that you don't have to follow the state regulations on. One more. We're kind of diving in the mud on this one. So this is implied exceptions. So there are several cases, one that came out in February, that talks about how far you can go as a county, how far can you stretch this authority. And in this... League of Women Voters v. Weld County case. It talks about—and Weld County lost this. So League of Women Voters sued Weld County, and they went to the Supreme Court with this. And they said, you can't use your own redistricting as a home vote. That's a mandatory function, the state says. You have to use it as a state. Guidance on that. And Weld County, to this day, will tell you that they disagree, that they think that redistricting is something that is uniquely local and that they would have an understanding of that. They don't need to use the state. But Supreme Court disagreed. The Supreme Court, in addition, gave us a test. It said, if you can relate this back to the structure of government, you have a lot of authority. You can almost have absolute authority to that. But if you want to talk about functions... One, you have to continue to do the mandatory functions. We know about that. But also, you can only regulate internal affairs of the county. So things that stretch across those county lines, you can't do that. So we have a school board, and that school board has schools in Douglas County, but also schools in Albert County. We can't come anywhere close to that because we can't tell Albert County what to do. We can't tell them what to do in their schools. The one that comes up is water rights. Well, can we make someone in the San Luis Valley sell us water rights? No. Because we can't write that on the charter because they don't have to listen to what we're doing. We can talk about internal affairs, things that have to do with inside of our county. There's another case, if you go in with it, it talks about this, and it talks about local concern versus state concern. Is this really something that is subject to your direction as a local government, or is it something that the state should be discussing? And in that case, it said, even if the state and the local general assembly said, this doesn't matter, it's a concern. It doesn't matter. It really is a question of, is this something that should be done at the local level versus the state level? In that case, God bless the court. They said, the courts will figure that out when it comes. So we'd have to put the court on some of these. Let's go forward one more. So then there's discretionary authority. And this is the one I think is really unique and important to some of the people in Douglas County, maybe some of the people in this room. If there's no state law on the books on something, you can write a law in the charter about it. One of the things that I think really comes to mind with me, and I'm a Denver native. I lived in Denver for about 45 years, and then I came down here. And I'll tell you, my family and I really do see the unique difference between Douglas County and Denver. Having lived in North Denver for a period of time and moving down here to Castle Rock, I was like, this is a different place. And it's different because there are things that are important to the people in Douglas County that might not be as important to people in other communities. So something like safety. There was a period of time a few years ago where there was a lot of defunding the police. So what if the Board of County Commissioners in the future said, we want to defund the police? Well, that's something they could do if they had two votes. They're in charge of the budget. So if the school decided to get together, they could cut FTEs, they could cut budgets to the Department of Safety, the Sheriff's Department. But what if it said in the charter, you cannot defund the Sheriff's Department without a vote of the police? or at the very least a public hearing on something like that or an ordinance being passed, you can put guardrails to make sure that the things that are important to Douglas County are in there and they have to work through those guardrails, open space. I believe about 51% of the county is open space. So a great deal of that is owned by the county Some of it's owned by the state, but a great deal is owned by the county. But what if down the road we have a different Board of County Commissioners and they want to build a bigger justice center or a bigger jail? Now, do you know what? We're going to sell some of this open space and get the money to sell that jail. Well, Castle Rock has a very nice thing in their charter that says you can't sell open space without a vote of the people. So if it's important that you take that decision away from the Board of County Commissioners and create that guardrail and make sure those things that are important to Douglas County are in this document. Let's go forward one more. None of this is something I came up with. None of this is something the board came up with. There is a roadmap that exists. You start out with those mandatory functions. You create the structure of the government. You add those explicit additional powers. You're required to add information about finance and debt. Also, we call it petitions. You add those regulations that need to be opted out of in the charter. They need to be included in there too. And that discretionary kind of identity elements. Can you go down this list? Absolutely. Are the first like four of them really easy to do? Yeah, you can knock those out pretty quick. The things that you need to talk to your community about are things that are unique to Douglas County. Those things that make Douglas County special. Let's move forward one more. So this is what other counties have done. This is what Pitkin and Welland have done, Denver, Broomfield. Those may be important to Douglas County. They may not be important to Douglas County at all. They may have them in there. It's really up to the 21 to decide what is important and what needs to be in there. If something is not included, the default would be to go back to the state. So if we fail to include something about animals, then we're going to follow state law about animals. Let's move forward. So we have some questions, and these are questions that come up. I give the same presentation to community groups as I would to you. I'll go through these kind of quickly, and I'm happy to answer these questions. Why so fast? The first one is because there are some statutory deadlines after that. Resolutions pass at the time that you need to get to that first election. And the second one is to avoid additional costs, but it's not written in civil. I mean, there's costs that are going to probably come about through this. Were there any secret meetings? Absolutely not. We're over 20 meetings going on right now. The first one was very highly publicized. We haven't had any opening violations. Let's move forward one more. As I just said, this gives the county a lot. This does nothing. This is a feather in the hat thing. This is something that will allow the county to have greater authority, but also at the same time, if written correctly by those 21 people, really define the county. codify the county, what's important, and put guardrails on that, the government, so that the next group of people, even though you have good commissioners now, the next commissioners have to follow suit the things that are important to the county. And will this lead to litigation? I talked a little bit about that. There might be some challenges, as I said, in Guelph County. It wasn't the state that was suited in Guelph County. It was legal and voters. But that being said, we're not like some of the smaller counties. We have a lot of A legal department, we have a litigation element of our legal department. And myself or Kelly Dunaway or Andrew Steers will be the people who will defend in this. And we have good insurance. So let's move forward one more. This is just a list. This is 100% a list of ideas that have been spouted out in meetings just like this. And will they be put in? It's not up to me. It's not up to the Board of County Commissioners. It'll be up to the 21 people that are elected by the community. And what's important for them. And so I think that's really the biggest thing. It's also really important to remember when you talk about these two, the two district counties, Bidkin and Wells, they're ideologically very different. This is not a partisan thing. This is not a Republican thing. This is not a Democrat thing. This is a tool and it's how the county elects to use this tool. Bidkin's very liberal, Wells not as much. So it is really something that how you elect to wield it, It's a tool worth doing the work for, for the county. So let's do one more thing. We're done. That's it for me. I don't know anything about those things. All right. Thank you very much for the presentation. So we will go ahead and move on to our questions. So just as your minor counsel, this is your opportunity to ask clarifying questions from his presentation. and for you to hold on the comments and commentary and debate. So we'll do round robin, one question at a time, going through every one of them. So who would like to start? Eric Ross and Hugh Bates. Thank you, and thank you for coming tonight. My first question is, what if the proposed charter is not ready by the November election? What happens then? It's up to the 21. So the 21 will get to a point where they're like, this is finished and we're going to move this forward. In the event that it's not done at that time, then the board will have to follow the laws regarding elections thereafter. And there would be a period, you're making me come off the top of my head with this. I think after that, I think you have 100 days to put that onto a ballot unless there's another election coming up. So if you go over, you can work on that. They do have to be 40 days to complete their work. So technically they might, I have to do the math in my head, to 40, it would be close to a second general election after that. So we have to get close to that, but it's probably likely that there'd have to be a special election. Yeah, I clarified. So my clarification, you said the board. Can you be specific, Board of County Commissioners, or the Charter Commission would have to decide what to do if the charter is not ready by the November election? Yeah, so the step is that the Charter Commission puts together drafts, that final one, and then moves court for approval for the board, and then the Board of County Commissioners would have to figure out a date and go to the clerk's office and come up with those things. Council Member Cole? Again, thank you for being here. You've answered most of our questions. I had quite a few to start off with between you and Linda and Claire. But I do have one. I'm concerned about the fact that they came out with all the good information. It says that the commission will operate independent of the Board of County Commissions. How is that possible if they are potentially on all three of the county commissioners that are running to be elected? How can they serve Both the left and the right hand. So that's a good question. And so there are two different bodies. So the authority of the Board of County Commissioners is different than the authority of the Charter Commission. And our Board of County Commissioners sits on all kinds of commissions and boards. So they sit on the Chatfield Board. They sit on dozens and dozens of boards. And this used to be another board, another task. Would there be a question of conflicts? Questions like that. I think that might be something that would be addressed in the rules because there will be some things where if you're risking any monetary benefit of something that you might have to be refused. But being on a commission is a different commission than the board itself is on. It's not unique in the situation. And by state law, they are permitted to do that. All right. Thank you, sir. Appreciate it. Council Member Salazar. Thank you for being here. I also had the same question as Ron, sorry, council member Cole, but I do have another question. So, and maybe I don't know, you can clarify for me. So I know when I did some research on the other counties that have this, that was petition that was brought up from the citizens, my understanding, this has been pushed down from the commissioners. So it's more top down than bottom up. My misunderstanding how this petition got started, or can you explain that better to me? who started the petition? Yeah, absolutely. Sure. So there's two ways that this can get kicked off, that first step. It's by citizen voter petition or by a resolution of the Board of County Commissioners. Those both exist as a matter of statute. In Weld County and Picton, there was different reasons why they were doing this. They had some disagreements about how the county board of commissioners were dealing with some land use matters in Wells County so that the public thought there was a need for that. And then Pitkin County, I believe, and I'm not the greatest historian on this, but I believe that there were some disagreements arising from potentially the Olympics being there. There were some disagreements about decision-making on that way. What's occurring now is unique and different and I think probably will lend itself to some degree to the They really need to get this done. Whereas the counties were against that, those efforts, the counties for this effort. And that's different because I think that there's some, what the county would see is some benefit from this because of the litigation that we've had, or maybe some, I don't want to use the word threat, but I'm going to use the word threat. Threats at the state level, things that redress like local control over zoning and some other things that they feel that there'd be a benefit, a legal benefit of having this as a tool. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you, Mr. Garcia. I appreciate you coming. Obviously, my concern is just about Castle Pines and how it will affect our city and our municipality in this role. You speak about autonomy. Autonomy for the county and the charter would allow more autonomy. How will that autonomy trickle down to us? I know you talked about it being nil or less, but you really can't... Say that, can you? Because you could really put anything, but these 21 members could put anything in this charter, right? And that could affect our city and our missile. Well, there's a statute, and I'm going to look, because I have to cheat. 3035-103, Section 2, says that the authority granted the Home Rule County cannot be used to override the authority of a Home Rule municipality, such as yourself. So the authority we're getting is not to govern That's fine. That's not the point. The authority we have is to exercise the county functions and the county. So unincorporated portions, without a doubt, and the function that we're required to do by state. But it would not. So no more than the state can do that to you now. We would just be intersection right there. That also would not affect it. So many things in the county do affect us. I mean, funding for things, I mean, you help us with the roads, open spaces, that affects us in neighboring cities. So if you do exert this autonomy, and I say you, but again, could that not affect our city in positive or possibly negative ways? Kind of a gamble. Are we going to Vegas? I hope we're not going to Vegas. Not on this. So I do think that there could be benefits for customers that I don't know. Most of the things that we already do in our interaction are things that wouldn't affect your autonomy and wouldn't be things that we wouldn't be able to do now. So we can contract with you now. We can make commitments to you now. We can help fund things now. This would have changed that. So I think this is, the question is, could we do it today? Those things that might have a negative effect on you. Yes. Right. And so it's really could you put things that are important to your community in here to make it so that there would be less a chance of that in the future? Definitely. But a lot of the things that you might have concern about, you should probably have concern about today if you didn't have a good relationship with the county. That's right. Yeah. I do have a question. So I'll just do my first now. This. This is somewhat of a semantics question, but I also really feel like the clarification is helpful for me. The words opt-out, that phrase, is being tossed around in its annual presentation, too. But when I look at the four categories, the place I see that concept is in the third or fourth implied exemptions, mixed data level control. And so my... The first part of my question is, do I have the right place? I would say actually second and third. Okay. There are some statutes that exist today that say this would not apply if it says it doesn't apply in the charter. So you have to literally opt out of that regulation. Okay. So there has to be a little thought. One, you have to go through all those existing statutes, and then you have to have some forethought about what might come in the future to make sure that that's kind of caught as well. And then... If need be in the future, you can make changes to the charter to get the benefit of that. Okay. So from that, I'm concerned about instead of two or four, which is literal lockdown, easy, the three or four, which is the mixed state and local concern. So my question to you now that I'm in the right place. Yeah. Now we, as a city and any other city, When a statute says it's a matter of mixed state and local concern, the evaluation has to be made at some juncture. Is it a matter of greater state or local? And then somebody can assert themselves, whether through negotiation or litigation, or stop something and be sued. There's a lot of different ways it could happen. My question, though, is... That part of the process, that part of the charter process and the opt-out as an implied exemption for mixed state and local concern, that operates the same for a county as for a home or city. So tell me how it's different. So the test that comes out of that case, that Wells County case this year, is is it a matter of state or local concern and is it a mandatory function of a county? Because they can dictate that. So the question wasn't, was this a matter that's within the boundaries? Of course, redistricting is definitely within the boundaries of Royal County. But they said, but it's a matter of mandatory function that is dictated by the state. So you don't have that at a municipal level. So it's a two-prong coming out of that. So there are some things that if there's nothing about, then there's no mandatory function that's not dictated in advance of. And it's local. You can get past that. So it's... It's stricter for state and California counties. So if I really try to understand this, because this has really been thrown around a lot, and it's key to my position, what better would it take? And so if there's no mandatory function implicated in the issue, such as redistricting, the issue presented is whether or not somebody can bypass the zoning law for a specific purpose. Mm-hmm. there's no mandatory function implied, then we go straight to the mixed state and local concern. At that point, is the analysis the same? Yes. That's what's important to me. So first you figure out, is it a mandatory function, which is kind of number one? I would do switch, to be honest, but I would do the, is it local or state? Is it something that exceeds the reach of the county? And then if it isn't, then is it otherwise dictated by a state law as a function of the county that must be performed? Okay. So the bottom line is if it's not a mandatory function, the analysis is the same. Yes. That's really important to me. Yes. Because this opt-out thing is thrown around a lot. So thank you for your time on that. I appreciate you walking me through that. Yeah. Now I will tell you, so let's talk about the Weldon County case. I think that everyone walking into that room for that redistricting was not a mandatory function. So there's still some... walking into a situation not being 100% sure, but if it's important to the residents and it's important to the county, I think it's worth putting in there, right? Thank you. You're welcome. So I had a question about on your slide that talked about the 47 items of explicit statutory authority, and you said that You could reserve the rights of those items. Does that mean that, let's say, for example, one of more cemeteries, you didn't contemplate it in the charter originally, but you reserve the rights. So do I understand you'd have to go back from the vote of the people to amend the charter, or would it be something that it would be done at an administrative level by the commissioners? I think that would be a drafting question for the 21 individuals. But the way it works in Pitkin is that they've said, we aren't going to do this right now, but if we are going to do this in the future, it will be by ordinance, resolution, vote of the people. So that they're still capturing that authority and saying, this is how we could use it, and this might be the process we're using it. And it would be unlikely that they would want to have to change the charter every time because there's a cost associated with it in the voters. So I believe that there's an ordinance or a resolution contract. Thank you. Mayor McCutcheon. Madam Mayor, may I add on to that? So in your line of question, if an item is reserved and can be addressed later and can be approved by an ordinance resolution, is it my understanding correct that the Board of County Commissioners would then create that resolution? So they would have the ultimate power outside of the Board of Commissioners. So the Board of County Commissioners would have the ability to do that to amend. Yeah, so can we go back to that one, actually? Let's go. Is it possible to go back to that slide? It's slide 12. Slide 12? We don't have numbers. This is kind of the first of them. Well, this is the last slide, and then it goes into . It's Charlie, can you go to 12, please? Yeah, follow the 20 slides. Oh, gosh. So some of these lend itself to the question, some of them don't. So like a vacancy, so if there was a vacancy, if the clerk quit for some reason, you would probably want a vacancy, how that would be taken care of in advance. I mean, you wouldn't reserve that. But a water franchise or a fee for something, that might be something that we don't know what the future fee might look like, but we want to reserve the right to set that in the future. So some of them would lend that to it and others don't. or we've returned money in the past. There's too much collected under the property tax, we return that. We wouldn't say that that was gonna happen. We might reserve the right to do that going forward, if that makes sense. And it wouldn't be the Charter Commission. The Charter Commission, when this is done, when this charter has been put forward to the vote, they're gone, right? And thereafter, it will be petitions, something going to the voter to amend the charter so that there's some permanency to the document. Council Member Henson. I would add to that before I ask my question is in our charter, which we just passed recently, we're the last of the municipalities to become a home world city. I mean, we have to go back to the people too. And there's a couple of things in our charter I'm not a big fan of, but in its totality, it was certainly great for us. But we definitely have to go back to the people here in the city. So you could write that in if so choose this for you. I wrote this down because I want to be very specific about it. How would a home rule charter influence the relationship between the county and municipalities, specifically when it comes to providing services? And when we do ask for something, would a home rule charter affect how we ask for money for our roads, or I'm going to ask when it comes to buying particularly our parks, or some sort of our relationship in how we partner on specific projects? How would that affect us and you being the county? Sure. So right now, I don't think that there's a document that says this is how we're going to interact with one another. So if there's a need, a request, and we want you to help build a park or pave a road or something like that, it would be a request. Now, that would still be the case unless the charter made a different procedure. So if the charter commission said, you know what, we don't really want to have to come. before the county commissioners ask for this, or we don't maybe want to develop that relationship. And I'm speaking here. There may be one more formal process. Maybe one application process, something like that. That could be created. But a lot of what we're talking about with the reservation rights or this are things that we were talking about down the road. After you have those 21 people in place and how you're going to want to talk with them about what they want to put in there. Could it be in there? Could an application process be in there? Yeah, that probably, that's pretty local. Right? It's a budgetary thing. So that would fall within. Can I follow up on that? Yeah, please. So are you asking us as citizens that once these 21 are elected and in place, that we should then lobby these setting 21 commissioners? So is it possible that the loudest people in the room, meaning citizens of Douglas County, will get their needs met possibly in this charter and those who are the quietest will not? I hope not. I hope that everyone gets their means met. I really hope that this is something that's reflective of the community. That being said, there are so many situations that if any of us were one of those 21 people, we do not understand. I've done these meetings and we've had people from very agricultural communities that I don't understand. If I was one of those 21, I would need to be educated. I would need to have someone come to me and say, you know what, you need to talk about admissions on farm vehicles because I would not think of that. And I'm assuming that those 21 people aren't going to have, you know, complete understanding of everyone's needs. So there will need to be a conversation. There will need to be a discussion. Now, the nice thing about the districts. is that you are going to find people from different locations in the community. So you will have people from your own community on this, hopefully, right? That you'll have people who are representative of it that you can have a relationship with. Or we'll see the information coming in and go, you know what? That is something that's important to the people that I represent. Or this will have an effect. Or I got this from the... City Council, they're saying, we would like a documented process on how to request county funds. Okay, well, that's something that could be managed that falls within what is in the purview of the charter. And that might be something that not only they're asking for, but every municipality is asking for. So... I do think that there has to be a community involvement. I have a few times said this will be tens of thousands of hours of work because it's not the 21 people. It's not county staff. It's everyone who cares about the county and being involved in this process. Pam? I'm glad you mentioned that because for reasons we've already discussed, we don't have a member of our community here in Castle Pines. from this council. My question is, we received a Q&A fact sheet of 12 questions today, this afternoon is when I first able to open it. Did you get that too for Ms. Michelle? I did not. Did you participate in drafting any question and answers before today for us? Just the slideshow today, right? Produce me anything else. I wouldn't produce anything for your brother. Thank you. Thank you. This is kind of a hard position, excuse me, to be in. So I'm going to reserve my right to ask you about the content of that because we're not sure if it's attorney-client privilege because of the way it was produced. So thank you. I'll just reserve my rights. Thank you for this question. So I want to make sure before I go back to Council Member Mulvey, does anyone else have any questions? Council Member Salazar, do you have any follow-up questions? I just have comments, but that's not the right time right now, right? Correct. Okay. I do, Mayor. Mayor, person you've met. Thank you. So I'm confused about the, and I'm going to not word it correctly, but the right to reserve something. Reserve. Is there a difference between the Charter Commission, I don't know, voting no or something. I have an example in my head, but I'm not going to use it, where the Charter Commission says, no, we don't want this. If the Charter Commission says no to whatever this is, that's not one of those items that's reserved where the Board of County Commissioners can come back and say, oh, I know the Charter Commission said no, but we reserve the right to write a resolution to that. So I don't think I answered your question well enough the first time around. So it's only reserved if the Charter Commission wants to do that. Okay, that's it. That's it, correct. So they can't come back and say, oh, it's on the list of 47. No, no, no. It's only reserved if they take the time and put it in the Charter. I'm trying to think of one that Pitkin did. Pitkin might have one. I actually know Pitkin has one for utility franchises. At the time of writing this in the 70s, they didn't see that as a thing they needed. But they said in the future, we might get Excel up here, or we might get somebody else up here, and we need to have the ability to have a contract with that utility. They didn't have that in mind at the time, but they thought in the future, we might need this, and they put it in there. If it wasn't put in there, then the authority wouldn't exist. That makes sense. That answers my question. Thank you. You're welcome. Sorry, I didn't answer. Oh, that's okay. Okay, Councilwoman Mulvey. Now, I have a follow-up in addition to my question. Can I ask the follow-up first? Yep. Okay. So, like the Constitution, if it's not in there, then regular law applies and the commissioners can come up with any resolution, just like we've come up with a fence resolution if we choose to. Is it like that? It's an interesting question because I think that a lot of times when we talk about this charter, we're thinking about it in the positive. But it can be negative, too. You can write, the Board of County Commissioners cannot pass a resolution on X if they wanted to. So it's not only that you get the powers to do things, it's also limits. So I think a lot of times when we've heard things in the community that this is some kind of power grab, this can be limiting. This can be reducing of government. I think that there's a natural element of that. It restricts government in some ways. That makes me think about what you said about the people that are next in the position are the ones that apply it. The new commissioners, whoever they might be. All right, so may I ask my question? I've been at a couple of forums about this, and one of the things that keeps coming up is the significance of the 240-day timeline. And so all of the back and forth about counting from this and counting from that is confusing. It doesn't always seem to satisfy the questioner. So my question is, have we considered on the county level from the legal perspective all of the timelines in the statute? And is it... If so, is it possible to complete the draft within the X number of days prior to the election for the vote? Is it possible? Because people say it's not. Yes, I do think it's possible, and I tried to make mention of that at the time. I do think that, one, the laws on this were written 50 years ago, so I do think that the ability to do this is different than it was then from a technology and communication standpoint. I think the other thing is that we benefit from the vote movement before us. So we are not looking at a blank page. I'm not saying, okay, where do we start? Instead, we're looking at the examples that we have. And I do think that the question that council themselves brought up is a good one because this isn't an adversarial relationship with the county. This is something the county is supporting. So if... If the Board of Commissioners wanted to put additional resources in some way, you want to use our hall, you can use our hall. You want to use our attorneys, you can use our attorneys. If you want to talk to finance about how this would work, you get to do that. And so I do think there'll be crunch time. So I do think that there'll be a period where you're working hard on this. But do I think it can be done? 100% So who keeps track of those deadlines? So There's a couple different people. So on all the election stuff, the clerk has to, from the board standpoint, probably look at the guy who got a volunteer to do that. And then from the members of the 21, their deadlines are pretty simple. They have, from beginning to end, they cannot exceed 240 days without getting a special kind of exception to go further than that. And so that's what they can keep track of. And they'll probably have some kind of support staff in that as well. Okay. Thank you. You're welcome. Councilman Branson. Thank you. You know, I've heard a lot about pros and cons and so forth. Again, my own concerns really percussive behinds in our residents here. We really haven't talked about the ability of the county if the charter is adopted or any charter is adopted about taxation and the ability to generate revenue. Is there special rights that can be granted to the county to generate new revenue or taxation that could impact my citizens that could cost us money? Yeah. Or maybe give us money back. Yeah. Yes. The answer to that is yes to all of it. So there is expanded taxation authority. There's some special districts that are in there. There's local fees that can be levied. So there's definite ways to increase revenue. I don't know that I've ever within my 21 meetings, and some of these are with, I don't always come by myself. Sometimes I have county commissioners with me or other people might be running for the office. I have not heard that. brought up. To be very fair, I've only heard, how can we get money back, or how can we reduce the budget, or how can we be more efficient in doing this? So I haven't heard of this as a way to increase taxes ever. We are approaching the end of this. Thank you, Mayor. This may be my last question. So just, you know, we've all had conversations when we've heard things from residents in Douglas County. So my direct question is, follow me here. The yes passes to former Charter Commission. However, I'm just making this up. None of the Board of County Commissioners are elected to the Charter Commission. Does the current future Board of County Commissioners have any authority to override what's in the Charter? Let me make sure I understand this. So none of the Charter... But them being on or off doesn't matter. So the question is, can the future Board of County Commissioners override the charter? No. They always require a vote of the people. Could the future Board of County Commissioners put a resolution forward, or I'm sorry, a ballot measure forward to have something changed in the charter? Yeah, but so could you and I, right? So they could do the same thing that any voter could. But no, they can't just unilaterally make changes to that charter. It's basically a hard document. Thank you. Great. There's still questions? All right. Thank you very much for coming. We appreciate your presentation. Thank you. All right. Council. Because we don't have a motion on the table, we don't actually have discussion. The way that we could do that is with a motion to suspend the rule. I don't know what the exact cracking would need to be, but because Council Member Salazar had mentioned that, we're going to take a five minute break. And if that's something that any of you wish to do, then you can confer with the clerk to see whether right languages in order to be able to do that. Thank you. All right. So we're going to take a five minute break and come back. at 6.47. 7.47, sorry. All right, we are back. Thank you very much. All right, so our agenda is, the next item on our agenda is for comments and reports. I'd like to be recognized, please, Council Member Mulvey. First, I would like to please thank the Clerk and Deputy Clerk for walking through this and answering the specific concern of the sections at issue. This is a matter of great importance to me on principle. I move to suspend the rules, section two meetings, and our section three, the order of the agenda to permit a member to make a motion today. Do we have a second? Whatever form you want this in, but I guess a question for Councilman Baldy here, I guess. Morning. purpose for you? I guess I don't know what you want to do this, but to what end? What purpose do you want to suspend these? So we can't have a discussion on this. We have to have a second week where we can have any discussion. Yeah, it's not appropriate. Right. Hearing no second, we'll go ahead and move on. So the next item, we'll move on to our comments and reports. We'll start with our report from our city manager. Do you have anything to report this evening? I do not. Thank you. And we'll move on to our council member reports. Council member Salazar, we'll start with you because I have a feeling you might be short. Thank you. I don't have anything to report. I just wanted to maybe share a comment. Thank you. I want to thank Jeff for coming in. My comment is my concern about which has been addressed by multiple members, the potential, if the commissioners get elected, the potential influence they might have in directing the commission. Of course, the hope would be that 18 other people would overpower that, but that is just something that was a little bit concerning to me that they didn't see that as a conflict of interest in running. That's all I have. Thank you. Thank you. I think our mics died. Council Member Mulvey, we'll go next to you. Thank you. I have a very strong feeling about the fact that a person cannot just make a motion for something anywhere in our rules or agenda. And it takes the voice of the people away. And for that reason i'm asking that the clerk be very specific in recording my motion in the minutes because this is a matter of tremendous importance to me i'd like to highlight what council member salazar said i see the same risk of influence from people who want to run for county commissioner on the board because they want to make a scenario in which They either want to govern or it's easier for them to get elected. For example, increasing it to five versus three or changing the election rules. And so I see there's a balance there of what the influence might be, and we won't know until they're elected. I would like to ask the manager next topic to... please provide us more information about the consent agenda item relating to Vacation of Canyons PA 1 and 3. It wasn't clear what the purpose was or what the change was. And so I'd like when we get our next report to please receive that. I'm going to be meeting with our transportation group tomorrow. And I want to highlight for everybody that funding of the Happy Canyon Interchange is a multi-pronged process. We are looking for funding from five or so sources at present. And every other city in our county that's been successful to this degree and this magnitude of a project, we're talking $41 million, I think, has had funding a leader and a plan. It can be a mayor. It can be a manager. But I haven't seen a plan and a strategy. And so that's what we're going to meet on tomorrow. Because in my research and my contacts as your representative on Dr. Cog and the sub-regional forum, it's important to talk to certain members of CDOT at different levels. And some of that's peer-to-peer. So there's commissioners, there's districts, there's planning people, et cetera. And that's to get the bridge paid for. To get congressionally directed spending or a bridge raise grant, we would be conferring with the Congresswoman, and we thank Ms. Budd for being here to understand our interest in doing that. But those conversations happen on various levels, too. And then, you know, the rest of it is part of the Dr. Cog process. We have to make decisions. I would like to encourage you to become interested as part of a team because we have to have a strategy and we have to have a team. And as an example, we are a crunch time, especially with the CDOT 4P to get the bridge money because we have competitors for the same funds who are putting in slide presentations and making impassioned presentations. And we don't have a slide presentation to give CDOT. And we don't have a coalition of people to fill in the survey that ends this week. And CDOT needs to have that stuff. So the team is important. I want to thank Manager Penny for realizing that. And I encourage full participation from everybody on that. The next item is that I'm a little concerned that we have, again, some folks who have multiple absences. And I think we need to have a policy about that. Because we had it with Councilmember Price, and he made a decision. But I don't know. We have the ability to participate remotely, and we won't have issues in our lives. Missing more than three in a short period of time can leave somebody out of the conversation when we may want to hear what their view is. And so I miss Mr. Blue and wish that he would participate. My next comment has to do with the sex crimes violation. Sex crimes are disgusting. We have in District 2, I'm not sure where. HOA 1 is right now. But in HOA 1, there was an arrest for violation for crime against a child. And it was within a mile of an elementary school or two that the person resided. And that person was a second-time offender. We appreciate the sheriff in doing the right thing and having a thorough investigation. But it concerns me that we're going down this road, and I don't know why it happened, or I'm sure we'll learn at some point, but we should really be vigilant about those things and watching our children. And then my last thing that I want to share is that Dr. Cogg is giving an award, and it's the annual awards to the Douglas County Housing Partnership, which we participate in. And I'm sorry if I'm taking that thunder from you, Mr. Cole, if you wish to address it. But our participation in the housing partnership resulted in accolades for the Prop 123 process. And so we had some discussion about participating in that and how it would benefit us. And it was the partnership that really got appreciated at that level. So I just want to share that with you. I think it should be publicized, and I think our participation in it should be publicized because it matters. It's how we can have say and take advantage of things and give services to our residents that we might not be able to here. So thank you very much. All right, we've had District 1 and 2. Let's go to District 3. Council Member Hudson? I have nothing to add. Thank you. Council Member Holt? Thank you. Thank you. All right. Just one item for your calendar, our event that we were going to get more education on development and how it works and the stakeholders and the entire workshop that was going to be full day on Friday. We had to cancel because we didn't have enough participation. Three of our council members were not able to attend, and we had quite a few planning that weren't able to attend. So we're looking at finding dates for September and August, and we'll send out a poll to get commitment for those dates so that we can do a scan because I believe it's extremely important to get this application. All right. We are going to adjourn at 8.02 p.m. Thank you. Yeah, that's