Thank you for being here we're gonna take just a moment if you would pull out your cell phone and When you pull it out, you can silence it that would be great But don't turn it off because you will need it later in the program. So All right. Well again. Good morning everyone. My name is Scott Cook. I'm the CEO here at the Longmont Chamber We live in an exciting. Thank you We live in an exciting time for our community, but we also have the challenges of growing pains In my role, I speak with business owners city officials legislators and residents every day a While ago, I mentioned to Mayor Peck and Harold Dominguez that we need to have a state of the city type event Where everyone can get a larger picture point of view on what is happening in their community. So here we are today Longmont is an innovative community with a small town feel and big city amenities We have unique opportunities and we face challenges that are not different than that than other communities across the country Such as inflation or even the impacts of recent global tragedies Today we'll take a look at where where we are as a community and get a glimpse of what the future looks like. I Would first though like to thank our sponsors Front-range state bank front-range state bank believes in the power of community and has a strong history in giving back Since the bank's establishment in 1899 front-range state bank has strived to make a positive impact in the lives of its customers and fellow community members alike Swire coca-cola Where they serve as a constant and true advocates for their people their customers their partners communities and our planet and commuting solutions Who is dedicated to delivering innovative transportation options that connect commuter commuters to their workplaces businesses to their employees and residents to their communities Please be sure to check out their tables in the atrium area You should have received the program when you enter today You will see on the program in order of events a presentation from Harold Dominguez our city manager and shorter presentations from our economic partners followed with time for Q&A Following the event there will be interviews with the city council candidates. You are welcome to stay for the interviews But these are not part of the regular program This event and the candidate interviews are being recorded today And you can view the presentation later through the Longmont Chamber of Social Media and through our website During the presentations. You are also welcome to ask questions to do this scan the QR code on your program I would now like to welcome our mayor Joan Peck. Thank you Scott and welcome everybody to this event I'm very happy to be a part of it I've discussed hosting a state-of-the-city event for a while now with Scott and Harold and I'm excited to welcome you here This morning There are so many positive things happening in our city right now and as Scott mentioned. We also have our challenges. I Along with our other city council work closely with our city manager Harold Dominguez on taking up these challenges Listening to our residents as to what they want in their cities is a large part of our job Thus the three ballot measures council has put on the on this year's ballot these ballot measures will bring customers into our city for our local and for our local and owned businesses for only a dollar a day or One dinner out for a family of four will Bring the dollars in for these amenities for a year We've seen I believe it's important for Longmont residents to be well informed as we all have a part in growing the community Harold has been with the city of Longmont since 2012 and has a grasp on a wide variety of city topics We have seen his leadership back in 2013 with the flood to today's current projects from Kaufman Street Public safety and more by the way this year marks the 10th anniversary of the flood We hope you visit the commemorative flood exhibit right here in your at your museum Now, please help me. Welcome Harold Dominguez our city manager Thanks, mayor pet for the introduction Scott chamber members. Thanks for having me here today. I really Appreciate it. I'm going to get away from this microphone because I think it's creating feedback I Really appreciate the opportunity to do this One of the things that we'll talk about in the slides as we continue to move forward is and later You will hear me talk about the council manager former government, but I'm actually going to start off with the policy objectives And the goals that the city council has set for our organization and what we're doing so when you look at the Vision the city council vision for Longmont related to people. I'm not going to read this I'm going to let you all read it, but This is really that high-level vision that they set the interesting piece and on this vision is It's actually been in play through a couple of city councils It has been adjusted with some tweaks to language, but this has really been something that's been in probably for the last four to five years When you look at their vision for places Same thing and I'm going to talk a little bit about the council manager form of government at this point when you're looking at it in that One of the things that I think a lot of folks don't realize that we're having to talk about in different different presentations is You know really who does what and the way our Government structure is set up via charter is that the city council is elected by the residents of the community And they set the policy objectives and the codes that we then follow We advise them in that process But then there's what we call the policy the public the policy administration dichotomy where the city council sets the policy We then operationalize the policy on behalf of the city council our charter actually is pretty specific Which is unusual in some cities and that the city council appoints Three individuals the city attorney myself and the municipal court judge the municipal court judge then is ratified every two years In but in terms of direction the only direction that the council gives in terms of operational issues Is actually to the city manager and the city attorney? The Charter is very specific to that. I then direct the operations based on the policy objectives that are established by the city council So let's talk about some of those policy objectives When you look at this and you look at this graphic during the last a goal-setting session with the city council We really spent the first day talking about core services And really what we're dealing with as a city and and the challenges that we're facing and and what is our primary role as an organization And and so we went through a couple of days and they said and they we built this graphic as they were going through the conversation So what that means is the foundation of any organization is actually our core services and what we provide on a daily basis So when you think of that you think of water wastewater Sanitation police fire code and all of those issues. That's why we're here for the health safety and welfare of a community The council then said we wanted to layer in and depending on how you look at this People see this graphic in different ways I look at it in terms of a house So think of the foundation as a core services. Some people say it looks like a rocket ship You can think about how the rocket's built So use your imagination as you're looking at this but really the subfloor that the council talked about is equity safety and sustainability And then in terms of the you know the structural support that they're approaching in this They said well, we want to look at housing for all early child care and education and transportation And when you look at Envision Longmont, and that's our city's comprehensive plan where we took we had massive amounts of Public input those goals actually align with the public input that was received in that process And then they said places and amenities So this starts charting the course for us as staff in terms of what we're going to work on and what we're going to look at And how we're going to budget so that we're actually we're in alignment with the council's goals and Procedure so that when we present the budget to them It is Aligning with what they want us to accomplish That does evolve over time If you want to look at this in more depth This is on our website, so you can really see specifically on the on the right side of the Graphic what we're talking about in each one of these individual areas What I wanted to start off with is really what's the foundation of any governmental organization and it's really our budget Our budget sets, you know the path for us as we're moving over the next year and This was a really interesting budget year, so for those of you all that may not know it. I I Think I'm in my 19th or 20th year as a city manager And I've worked in multiple cities, but every city has its own nuances with the budget process And I could probably talk for an hour and a half just on our budget process and what that really means But it is different than other cities It is very different by charter than how most businesses operate in terms of we we have to carry money over every year We can't fund capital projects But this budget was different and it was different because of the issues that we were having with inflation But normally when you look at your property tax that tends to be pretty consistent in what we're looking at and with some of the Legislative actions that were taken there was some uncertainty in this Specifically HH it was very hard for us to understand what was if HH passes. What's the impact of that? What does that mean to our revenue stream? So when you see well, we have X amount of money that we're holding We're actually holding that because we don't know what The actual dollar impact is going to be with all of the increases in the assessed valuations We know there's a lot of appeals that are going on So we just had to hold that money and we couldn't allocate it Because we wanted to take a more conservative approach in the budget that we presented to the city council So that we didn't over allocate our dollars and then we would have to come back in and then make cuts Once we understand what the numbers are really going to look like As you all know inflation Is a significant issue for you as individuals any one of us that goes to a grocery store? And we look at how much we paid for something three years ago versus how much we pay for it now is A significant impact in the budget process I think for cities It's it's even more difficult because we touch every commodity that you can imagine and when you look at inflation And how it's impacting things like the cost of steel the cost of concrete the cost of asphalt and those types of issues What you're really finding is some of those have the highest increases Based on inflation that you can actually imagine and so what that has really created for us is some struggles in terms of Capital projects that we had to get through you may have seen in the newspaper that we presented to the city council a few years or a few months ago about How we were estimating some of our projects whether it was Nelson Flanders Kauffman Street Boston Bridge, which is related to flood recovery and every one of those increased dramatically millions of dollars Based on the just the the high inflation rate that we were seeing we're also seeing that in terms of employment There was a great article in the Denver Post About a month and a half ago really about how employment the same issues that you all are dealing with as business owners Has actually really hit the government sector and how we're all competing with four employees right now and it's Probably the most significant challenge that I've seen in employment and in my career And and that's connected to what people want what they're looking for in the job in their jobs How they want to work and then we're chasing each other So when we do market studies every year to determine what is the market compensation over the last two years We've seen the largest increases that we've probably ever seen in the history of this organization And the reality is if you don't keep up You're not getting the best talent that you can to fill those positions And so for us that's really been one of the most significant impacts to the budget and that's every position And in the organization Filling positions has also been a significant issue for us in that the labor supply has just changed dramatically You all know this But we're experiencing the same thing And then finally providing the resources To meet the rising demands and existing services one of the things that the mayor talked about in terms of listening to the community The last few budget years that we've we've worked through We've had a number of people come to us and say and and if you're in the screw by apologize I'm just using it as an example. We want more services in our library. We want more pickleball courts We want more recreation opportunities. We want all of these things Well, when you take inflation and then you take what's happening in the employment market and you look at the incremental nature of the Revenue coming into the organization that doesn't really give us a lot of capacity to deal with those issues and So if most of your money is really just going to deal with your ongoing operations It's hard for us to do that. We do have a public improvement fund and some other things that we can utilize But lo and behold, we had three buildings that all of a sudden started having significant structural issues If you go to the library today or you go to the Civic Center or if you go to the public safety building What you're going to see is that we've spent and I'm going to look at Sandy for this I think over 20 million dollars in those buildings You can't visibly tell a difference and the reason is is because what we had is deferred maintenance That really hit and we had severe structural issues. We have foundation failures I can't even I could talk for 20 minutes on the problems that we're seeing on the buildings So the capacity that we did have in the public improvement fund actually had to be used on dealing with these Deferred maintenance issues and we started that about six or seven years ago When literally I was sitting in the office and I had her to Allow pop where the structural tendon broke and that started is chasing down this issue And that's always refreshing when you're in the in your office and you hear this loud bang and you're like, what is this right? When you look at our budget, it's balanced With no tax rate increases and I think this year is something that when we talk about the budget That I think is getting a little tied in with some of the ballot initiatives We did not propose a tax rate increase for Our operating budgets and our capital budgets. We do have fee increases in the budget and that's really helping us to manage our operations based on inflation related to those enterprise funds and Understanding enterprise funds and legally what we can and can't do is again another 20-minute conversation So I'm not going to bore you with all of the details But you can kind of see the numbers in terms of what we're looking at overall and When you look at the 444 million dollar budget that includes 60 different funds at least I think 60 is what we have on the list Water wastewater sanitation electric broadband and we can't co-mingle those funds So people go well if you have a 400 million dollar budget, why can't you use it for this general fund activity? We're actually prohibited by court cases and legislation in terms of co-mingling those funds We also have a public safety fund that goes directly to public safety improvements And we have a street fund in a park in open space Can't co-mingle it When you look at this, you know again sales and use tax use taxes have been an interesting one for us in this budget process and it's the it's probably the most sensitive revenue stream to interest rates and inflation and when we look at Our sales and use tax for 23 being 2.23 percent over 22 That's probably that is all sales tax growth when I look at the monthly reports from Jim Golden Use tax is behind. I think the last report we were behind by around 11% That's a direct reflection on inflation and insurance because use tax is home starts companies like yourself that make improvements into your buildings large companies that make Investments in their equipment and technology and so what just seeing that number and how far behind we are is really telling me that There's a contraction in terms of what people are spending in that use category Lumber's a big part of it when we look at what we're doing in the budget, this is just some examples in terms of What we've put in in terms of the people vision and the council's vision and what we're looking at so What a lot of folks don't know is When you see the cares rebates when we're setting the rates for our utilities We actually build in rebates for those individuals that struggle with being with being able to pay their utility bills You can see the early childhood mixed in The piece on the marijuana tax is something that we've changed this year in the proposed budget that we made to the city council and What we're going to do with that 275,000 is we're going to hire two mental health clinicians and those clinicians are going to actually work in Conjunction with the housing authority and we'll talk about that housing authority in a little bit But they're also going to work in conjunction with all of our mental health service providers So that we can deal with these broader community issues that long months experiencing But I will tell you and talking to city managers across the region every city's dealing with it Every city's dealing with it in every state And as I talked to my colleagues, it's just an ongoing challenge for us When you look at this next bullet point Where we have 400,000 of one-time funding and 350,000 of ongoing funding for attainable housing You know, I'm going to talk about housing The city many many years ago there was a group that met prior to me coming in one of the Recommendations from the group was to build a million dollars annually out of the budget for affordable housing. We've done that What we're doing now is actually creating an attainable housing fund and I'll get into the differences between those and so today Based on the policy direction. We now have six hundred thousand dollars of ongoing funding roughly In total from last year's budget and this year's budget An ongoing funding and four hundred thousand to hit a million dollar mark for an attainable housing fund That will operate similar to Our affordable housing fund. There we go What I do all right Places Again when we talk about this some things that I really want to point out so you see 648,000 one funding for one-time micro transit system We've been in conversations with RTD for some time about The lack of service on the RTD system in terms of the fixed route and what they provide We actually got a grant from RTD this year The first year is going to be 450,000 and then I believe it goes down to approximately 375,000 over the next two years This is to partner with us in developing a micro transit system. I'll go into more details in the later slide And then again, you can kind of see the other thing I wanted to point out was The hundred and fifty thousand four vision zero that's going to really change how we approach Transportation and how we look at Our processes When we look ahead as business owners You're probably worried about the same issues that we have on this slide the other day And in looking at some economic forecast the Fed I think released a statement that said expect seven percent interest rates That's going to be an interesting challenge for us In terms of what that means and with inflation and some other issues So when we look at future budget years, there's still a lot of concern that we have but we also have some optimism in terms of what we're going to do So let's talk about transportation One of the questions that we often get is what are you investing in terms of dollars into your transportation system? We actually have a street fund and a special sales tax associated with that And so we do put I think this year in the budget. We're going to have about seven point eight million dollars just in Our asset or resurfacing project but we also have concrete work that we do that we find and so in general, I think we're going to be at around ten million dollars in terms of Working our program in terms of managing our assets I will say this year has been one of the worst years for streets that we have seen and It's the same way in every city just based on the nature of what we were experiencing with weather and the fact that You know the extremely you have the snow the extreme temps and then we had a very wet Spring and summer which really impacts construction schedules Vision zero so what's the goal of vision zero it's to eliminate all traffic fatalities you can read this as We've been talking to the city council about vision zero It's something that we looked at a few years ago And one of the things that the council said is well Let's really see what's going to happen in terms of the funding cycles We did have a lot of residents in the community talk about traffic safety and what they want to do So that fit in with vision zero But one of the other changes that we've had is that most of the state funding now for Most of the federal and state funding for transportation also really requires That you have a vision zero plan and what you're going to do if you don't have it You're not going to be eligible for some of the funding streams that we utilize So this is a big task in the budget you will see a number of positions that have been allocated to to deal with vision zero and We're going to begin that work. We're starting it now, but next year You will actually start seeing the public involvement process because one of the key points of vision zero is that you work with your Community and you work with your neighborhood, so there's going to have be a lot of public engagement in this process in terms of developing that plan First of the main transit station When I got here 12 and a half years ago. This was something that everyone we were talking about Within the RTD bucket. There was a 17 million That was 17 and a half million. We've been spending some of it on design a Couple of months ago. We actually finally signed the IGA with RTD So we are in property acquisition on first and main transit as we speak They're moving into design of one of the things that actually really happened out of the 2013 flood that impacts this area Is it actually became part of the floodplain? And so the work that we've been doing and for flood recovery is actually removing that out of the floodplain Has removed it out which lets us move forward This is going to support our local transit system our bus rapid transit You can see the the transit line that we have that runs from Fort Collins It is also going to have the ability for a rail connection There's a lot of work happening on rail between What RTD is doing in front-range passenger rail which the mayor is actually on that board and We're probably going to see something in next summer from that group in terms of what that rail looks like in the future So we're in designing what we're really hoping is tentative construction in 2025 So we can get this going this actually will then connect with the microtransit system that we're talking about And then Kauffman Street So Kauffman Street is really taking some of those concepts that's associated with vision zero But it's really looking at a multimodal system. I know we've had some conversations with the DDA in terms of bike pad Safety issues and so when you look at Kauffman Street What we're actually going to do is move the buses off of Main Street the buses will then work off of Kauffman Street Connecting to Kauffman to the transit station. That's going to help with some traffic flow on Main Street because the buses will really at times create backups and Then we're going to have bike lanes obviously Ped access we're currently reworking our signal system generally, but it'll be here for a Smarter signal system that actually can respond to Bikes or pedestrians and intersections and so if you've been like me and you got caught in the middle of an intersection And all of a sudden the time's out and you're like I have to run this actually will Manage your time based on whether or not someone's in the intersection. So it's really about safety Boston Avenue Boston Avenue has been another one of those projects has been on the list that probably for 20 years What this really does will allow us to cross the railroad track What we're hoping that it also does is to take some of the traffic off of Third Avenue to help with the neighborhood issues We're in front of the PUC right now And so ultimately the Public Utilities Commission has to make the decision on whether or not we can do this Fingers crossed we think we're hearing some good information from them. So hopefully in the next month or so we'll get an answer to that but This really then is going to connect the west side of our community to the east side We don't really have a strong west to east connection We have Longs Peak and some other roads, but really 17th is the You know between 17th and Ken Pratt. That's the gap and so this will really connect our community And then transit so what is a microtransit mean? Well, it means that you can call this number when we develop it And you can pick it up and you have five minutes And then you can get And then they'll take you to your destination and I'm getting the thing on money or on time So I'm going to speed up housing is a big issue for us in terms of what we're looking at. So Housing's been as you all know housing is one of the most significant issues For everyone in Boulder County in Colorado You can kind of see what we're doing from current to future when we look at Projects that have been built when you start at 2023 You can see chrisman to vcp Veterans community project habitat in 24s. We have a number of projects. That's also associated with the work that we're doing on the housing authority This is a new project that we're working on with this housing authority in city This is the ascent at hover crossing. This is actually going to be family housing One of the things that we know from the housing authority is the We are dominated by age restricted units But the highest need that we're seeing in our community is actually for housing affordable housing for families And so this will be a three and two one two three and four bedroom unit We're actually in the tax credit process now for this on November 3rd. I have a presentation to Chaffa on this project so that hopefully we can get awarded the tax credits This is going to be a mixed income project So we're going to have 30 to 50 percent AMI units and 70 to 80 the average income process now actually lets us get deeper affordability and more affordable units Atwood commons is another project that's in play the one thing I will say about the ascent project is that will Include an early child care component that we're working on Over the last three years, we have absorbed the Longmont housing authority I Gave a presentation to the rotary earlier this week. We talked an hour and a half on this issue and what we've had to do I'm currently serving as the interim executive director for the housing authority. Why am I doing that? Well what really happened is the board approached the city a few years ago about we need your help with this When we started looking at their budgets When you take how much money they were spending on their executive director and how much they were spending on their chief financial officer There wasn't a lot of money for operations So there's some cost savings And some other issues we actually had a conversation with with HUD on this one And our concern when we started talking about this was could we be put in receivership? What we didn't know what none of us knew But we heard a year and a half later from HUD is that HUD was actually about to call us and And say we need you to the city to jump in and and take over because of concerns And so we didn't know it but the good news is we didn't get put in a formal receivership program When we talk about this this is our general fund forecast the one thing that I want to show you is when we look at Where we're sitting What we're doing is actually now forecasting out A number of years to really see what the fund balance is going to look like that actually then informs when we needed to bring Projects on so if you look at the red down here and you see the developer fees and the management fees That's actually related to the ascent project So you can see when we bring that project on and we can bring in the additional revenue it dramatically changes The bottom line for the housing authority in addition to bringing the units in it strengthens the operational requirements that we have to do and Then it also tells me by looking at this is that in 2026 we need to have another project coming online So we can strengthen that fund balance even more Public safety I wanted to talk a little bit about this smart city projects and I'm probably going to eat into some of my question time So smart city projects, I know people have asked the question. Why are you doing this what? You all may not know as we are putting cameras in our Parks in other areas I will deal with this in questions later But what I will tell you is I've never seen an ROI this strong What this technology has allowed us to start doing is we've had a number of cases and it actually started being born out of the Rita Gutierrez case in terms of when she was missing and and they had been using ring doorbells When we utilize the cameras now What could have taken months is now taking Literally one or two days in terms of the information that we're seeing and what we're able to track down Gives you a sense of where we're putting these cameras also using license plate readers a Lot of cities are moving to this I will tell you if you think about the famous footwear issue that we had it It was actually those cameras in multiple cities that allowed everybody to grab ahold of the situation and get a resolution quickly We're also building an LTE network in conjunction with the school district This is actually to bridge the digital divide for those individuals that can't afford Internet services To do their school work. We're we're building off of this to then provide our own LTE network for city functions So that we can transmit the data on the cameras And what we're doing and then also let us connect into our systems We pay about $50 a month per card that we use to power our public safety cars at the end of the day When we build this this is going to dramatically reduce our operating cost Organizational approach this is what our organization looks like when I talk to groups I say if you were ever going to build a business you would never build a business that looks like a city government When you think of city government think of PepsiCo and think of Coca Cola in terms of the differences in the business units I mean we go everywhere from our social service functions in the organization to next slide Which is really a pure private operation that government is competing in the private sector and everything in between So you naturally have conflicts that you're having to deal with when you're having to manage these different issues And you can see at the top where we talked about the You know the Longmont residents the city council and then the city manager that really relates to the council manager form of government This is how we're structured now. So you see Public safety a few of my folks are here. So I have Sandy Zach artists here if you haven't met Zach Zach stand up Zach's probably the one people don't know Zach's our new public safety chief and that Zach came here during COVID and so getting to meet the community was kind of hard during that time So I wanted to make sure but I see Valerie David Hornbockers in the back. I saw him And so that's my direct team we're actually moving into a center of excellence model and What really started this is when you look at our structure It is inherently very siloed and what we were finding that is we were trying to deal with issues as an organization It didn't allow us to really work. We didn't work well across the organization And so we kind of took the center of excellence model from the private sector And then we started moving into adopting it for the public sector. So you see this is how we work. So what does that mean? It really means that we're working together across the organization and instead of looking at government in the Traditional structure of here's each one of these areas. This is how we work in real time with each other to handle these big issues for that That hit us in our community Lanyon Park is the best example if you all saw what we were dealing with in terms of that park and what we were hearing from the neighborhoods a Really significant issue. We also saw at a car park in other areas We built a neighborhood impact team utilizing the principles of Center of excellence. It's actually run by Carmen Ramirez and Sarah Arne There's an executive group that they bring the big issues to us, but in terms of the daily operations You you give it to the people who know what they're doing and have all the information and so they're running This is what it looks like in terms of how we work What we found is that utilizing this approach we can deal with issues and probably a quarter of the time based on what we normally did It tends to last in terms of how we're dealing with different problems in that You don't see it continuing to pop up and what we're finding is that it's now giving us a capacity to shift So any neighborhood issue that we're dealing with this group is dealing with it and they're bringing everyone in the organization to solve So what's next? mental health In enforcement coordination is really the next two center of excellence that we're building Because these all then tie into everything that we're talking about that's challenging us as a community So I sped up I finished I'm gonna answer any questions you all have now. So Karen. Do we have any questions? Oh? Oh, there it is excellent. Well, can we get a round of applause for our city manager Harold Dominguez? That last bit you really jumped to light speed and we appreciate it lots of super valuable Information so now is the audience participation, but you don't even have to raise your hands You can use the mini computers in all of your hands and pockets So if you grabbed a state of the city program, you will notice that there is a QR code on the bottom Please give any questions to Harold and the city of Longmont team We only have about six minutes for this right now So I'll ask some that we've already received But Harold and his team have said that they will answer any and all questions that come through and we will post Them on the Longmont Chambers event page after this. So please ask away Our first question Harold is actually about the smart cities that you were able to touch on briefly Can you speak to how the decision to move towards Longmont becoming a spark smart city was made who made that decision? And what will be the impact to Longmont citizens? Well, I think the decision actually started with the creation of next slide when you have the fastest Internet of any city in the nation and The services you're providing that is the base platform to smart city But it's also really how do we use technology as a force multiplier in what we're dealing with you? Heard me talk about how fast we're able to see things in the community That may have taken five years ago four or five officers months to deal with if you're getting that data and you're seeing it You know that reduces that so that expands a capacity of the organization which reduces the operational cost It also provides services to the most needed in our most and the people that need it most in our community when we talk About access to the internet and really closing the digital divide and kids being able to do homework You would be surprised how many kids in our community weren't able to do their homework during COVID And we have people go into houses with hotspots And so it really makes us more robust and at the end of the day It actually reduces our operating cost as we look at being able to bring this technology in play Great. Thank you There's a few questions about affordable housing and I'm wondering if we can speak to generally the Collaboration between the city private entities like developers How do we incentivize both affordable and the attainable housing the differentiation that you mentioned between those two and Infill housing was specifically mentioned as well. So go for it Harold So when we talk about affordable housing, there's many different categories so much on the home ownership side What you actually have is capital a affordable housing Is 80% AMI and below on the rental side? It's 50% AMI and below when you look at attainable housing on home ownership It's 80 to 120 percent AMI and when you look at on the rental side It's actually probably here Market rate rents are looking Flexually between 80 and 85 percent if you look at it both old and new properties. It's 80% AMI So in that 70 to 80 percent is actually the attainable housing on the rental side We have a really fleshed out program in terms of affordable housing And what we're doing with the light tech projects and then we are developing an attainable housing program We presented to the city council Councils given us direction to bring that program back Actually, I think the first reading is going to be next Tuesday And that's going to allow us to provide some incentives and toward the creation of attainable housing Housing is a big is a big issue. I see many people that I've talked to about it. Eric and I've talked about this Why is it so big if we can't hire people because they can't afford to live here? What does that mean in terms of your businesses and how you operate? What does it mean if we're struggling to hire people because of the cost of housing? People are literally not applying for jobs because it's too expensive to live here Our public safety officers are moving further and further away our LPC staff is moving further and further away This is really going to be an issue that challenges the core economic condition of our community and Challenge us in terms of how we serve you we're having to extend the response time For our LPC our power staff Because of how expensive it is to live So what does 15 minutes mean if you're having to bring someone in it takes 15 minutes more to respond to an outage That impacts you all directly So when we look at housing and I go what's the biggest threat to? frankly, Colorado And our economic condition this housing is at the top of my list because People are self-selecting out. I can't tell you how many times we've offered a job to someone and they don't take it because of the Cost of housing Thank you for answering that tough question We'll end on one quick one Obviously, we have a lot of businesses in the room and sales tax is a large contributor to the city budget So what is the focus from the city on supporting business growth within Longmont? So we partner with a lot of organizations, so I know you're going to hear from the DDA you're going to hear from LEDP That is sort of bringing the information into us. I know we have different grant programs that we fund a lot of conversation that we had with Whether it's COVID CV funds or ARPA funds and how we support But I think what we try to do is use our partner organizations that we contract with to get the information Coming to us so that we can then interact with the businesses to the best of our ability One thing I will say is I often meet with businesses. They call me and they go Hey, we want to talk about this going on or what's happening here? And so I think really just making ourselves available and understanding what the issues are that our businesses are facing What I will say is when you look at the sales tax component And we've had to go through this we have open space Public safety and transportation sales tax those were voted on by the community There's a lot of sales tax that are actually connected to the county and when you start looking at who has the highest rates It's really looking toward the county in many cases. So I wanted to kind of bring that out Excellent and that puts us can you believe it right on time we nailed it. Thank you again Harold We really appreciate you joining us at this event and Now we're going to bring up our economic partners So if you need to wiggle your feet for a little bit just just stay seated while you do that and Yeah, we're gonna keep going Again, if you have further questions for city staff or Harold Domingo specifically you can continue to submit those throughout the event We will take all of those questions and funnel them to the city I am now going to bring Mark Shealy to the stage He's the chief credit officer with Front Range State Bank to introduce the next portion mark. Thank you Good morning and welcome to the state of the city event Harold. Thank you for your informative presentation As Karen stated, my name is Mark Shealy. I'm with Front Range State Bank We are excited to participate in this inaugural event for the Longmont Chamber To continue, I'd like to introduce our economic partners panel to start us off is Dr. Chris McGilvery Board chair for the Longmont downtown development authority Chris McGilvery chair of the Longmont downtown development of board of directors member of the LACC BODs owner of Longmont Lickers and Academic Dean for Front Range Community College Recent appointment is mouthful there where he leads several CTE programs that include manufacturing automation and Electronical engineering welding automotive and machining technologies Chris is followed by Valerie Dodd Board member for the Longmont Economic Development Partnership Valerie Dodd is the executive director of next light the city's award-winning Fiber internet service provider Celebrating nine years of operations this November She is representing LEDP today, but also sits on the Longmont area Chamber of Commerce board Valerie has worked in telecommunications for 30 years prior to moving to Colorado seven years ago She was the VP GM over the state of New Mexico for Lumen technologies While in New Mexico, she served on several boards of organizations focused on economic prosperity Including the Albuquerque Chamber Albuquerque Regional Economic Alliance and the economic forum. She is thrilled to be here in Longmont now Our final presenter is Scott Cook CEO of the Longmont Chamber This is a role. He has held since 2017 after having held a few different roles at the chamber before the chamber Scott worked on the hill in Washington DC and ran a small family owned recycling business in suburban Chicago Scott grew up in Longmont and enjoys combining his love of business and Public policy into one role at the chamber serving his community This session will have time for Q&A So please use the QR code on your program to ask questions as we go through the presentations Please help me in welcoming Chris McGilvray doctor Chris McGilvray to the stage All right. Thank you mark. Thank you to the Chamber staff for putting this event together and for you all for attending and Being so vested in our community So I'm going to be here on behalf of the Longmont downtown development Board of Directors to provide a high-level overview of the LDDA and our strategic Initiatives within each of the different focus areas of our master plan We're gonna go to the next slide. Oh Oh, I have the clicker. Okay All right. Excellent. So about the Longmont downtown development authority. So we were founded in 1982 and we have seven Board of Directors and what makes the LDDA unique is this is the only board in the city that Has the requirement that you have to be a vested member of our community either through property ownership within the district or a business owner So we have seven board members and we have a unique funding model We're funded through an operating mill levy along with tax incremental financing TIFF the LDDA Manages a small maintenance district the GID along with our parking fund and So the LDDA master plan, which was recently updated back in 2017 outlines our Strategic priorities. We have six strategic pillars Economic vitality place-making and urban design creative district Cotton activity at land use and leadership and I'll give a high-level Overview of our what we're working on within each of those starting with economic vitality LDDA we build tools to help our property owners and our businesses Invest in their properties and their businesses through a lot of different Tactics lots of different grants such as the retail conversion grant facade and signage grants and over the last ten years Our retail conversion grant has helped over 20 businesses incentivizing 275,000 to leverage 12 million dollars of investment in making our downtown what it is today and as vibrant as it is today We use data. We're always looking at data to drive our decisions and our priorities We have pedestrian counters that track sales. We track property value We're investing in place or AI which is a phone-based data that tells us how are people getting to our downtown And what we're seeing is more and more people are taking 3rd Avenue Into the downtown along with Pratt Parkway We have folks that come visit our downtown from all 50 states every year We have over three and a half million people visiting our downtown And we mentioned a lot about the metrics is that we're measuring our success on in the downtown and Harold mentioned sales tax We are always looking at sales tax and property values And so through the month of September the downtown district sales tax was up 16.5% however, we're starting to see in discussions with our business owners and our block captains that Sales are starting to flatten out do some of due to some of the challenges that Harold highlighted particularly around inflation Local business support so Valerie is going to take more of a micro Perspective on this and I'm going to go more micro And so there's challenges that we're faced with Business owners in our district starting with inflation We're hearing that inflation's really starting to slow business down and the cost of doing business is We've seen dramatic increases just over the last year as Harold highlighted Employee costs being a big big part of that And so a lot of our business owners right now are thinking outside the box in like how can we do more with less resources and respond to these pressures there's still concerns about remote work and Particularly with our largest employer in the city the city of Longmont where we still have a Significant about an amount of our employees that used to work in the downtown that would support the You know the coffee shops during their lunch break and now So there's that discussion Affordability as Harold mentioned is a discussion but if you ask all of our business owners and we just had a meeting last Friday with our retail and our Restaurant folks about what are the challenges? It's a people it's employment. It's finding talent retaining talent And building our workforce There's still supply chain issues that we discuss that we discussed as well. There's traffic congestion You know as we continue to grow it's Becoming well, it's always been dangerous at certain points within our downtown in regards to walking across the street and so That's something that's on our minds as a board is you know, how do we strategically look at ways to slow congestion and slow traffic as we're going through Main Street Place making an urban design place-based economic development This is about working to preserve the character and the authenticity of our downtown So you know when you enter the district and when you leave the district? But I have to say safety is at the top of our priorities It's the foundation to everything and making sure that we have a clean safe downtown We've added 19 cameras. Well, we have the city has added 56 cameras 19 of those are strategically placed throughout the downtown through our breezeways alleys parking lots we've added string lights for safe travel and We're putting a lot of energy into ensuring consistency around our signage designs throughout the district Creative district LDDA is one of 20 or so certified creative districts in the state of Colorado Where our mission is to work with partners to enhance the creativity in our creative industries through events that engage our community Such as parades live music wine walks and sidewalk sales It's all about celebrating us celebrating the people our business owners our employees and What makes our downtown unique? We've launched a campaign everybody's neighborhood campaign where we had st. Rain Valley school district students build amazing videos they actually highlighted one of my my particular business and so impressed with the work of our st. Rain Valley school district students and They're actually going to be putting out 35 more targeted videos this year Cognitive So as we think about vision zero and the moving forward towards that it's important to remember this People are more important than cars Our board has prioritized people improvements pedestrian improvements above all else We've invested $500,000 into planning and implementing better pedestrian strategies that are aimed at slowing traffic down Including cognitive activity and pedestrian improvements starting with the flashing lights that you've probably seen on Main Street As Harold mentioned, we're investing six hundred and fifty thousand dollars into micro transit and the DDA would like to run a downtown shuttle Through construction where there's a lot happening in the downtown. There's a lot of constructional projects, which is Adding a new hotel, which I'll get to in a second. So this micro transit will be a Good tactic to help with the parking issues through that project We got parking and wayfinding DDA. We study parking all the time every other year We're investing 20 to $50,000 in studying parking and using data to make smart decisions around addressing our parking needs What these studies continue to tell us is we have plenty of parking We have 50% roughly of available parking during peak times and so yet There may be times when there won't be a parking spot directly In front of the pump house, but if you walk one block in either direction There's available parking All right land use The LDDA is a redevelopment organization. That's what we are meaning We use our land and how we use our land in a strategic way Downtown is the core of Longmont and we work to support the infrastructure needs and fund the gaps around the things that we need to progress our community forward in In the past 10 years our public private partnerships through Investing in the Roosevelt Apartments South Main Station and the spoke of Kauffman That was a hundred and fifteen million dollars in total investment adding over five hundred residential units and mixed use And along with two parking structures to our community. I Have to talk about Hotel Longmont. This is super exciting on third and Kimbark Hotel Longmont meets a 30-year need for our downtown and Longmont by adding lodging to our downtown area As well as a destination Restaurant with a rooftop view of the front range This is going to add 84 units and the construction is slated to begin at the end of the year We also have Kauffman street busway project that Harold Highlighted this is a complete rehab of 1st and 9th Avenue that's going to look at the land and our public right away It's going to create a multimodal street with pedestrian amenities Separate bike lanes cars and bus lanes and what this is going to do is direct bus traffic off of Main Street to better strategically utilize Kauffman Street and to its full potential in In the pipeline we have several new restaurants mixed use developments and Over 500 more residential units proposed in on the books. We've got huge Opportunity at 1st and Main transit area that's going to add housing retail parking and commercial space And the last strategic initiative is leadership. It's all about the people we've got The the focus over the last year, we've done a lot of great things through the district But in my opinion the greatest success we've been able to accomplish is in the efforts of public policy And so we helped initiate and take the lead on advocating for the passing of a TIF Which is tax and incremental financing Legislature at the state level to extend access to TIF funding. This was massive We were we had about eight years left in our TIF And what extending this allows us to do is to continue to leverage this tool for future development Big big deal in Longmont our LDDA Kimberly McGee under her leadership And the support of our current city council Made this happen Our board and staff we continue to lean on our master plan. So in 2024 We're going to initiate stakeholder engagement set some clear goals that align with this master plan over the next five years there's going to be so many opportunities for the chamber and everybody in this room to get engaged in our priorities and Lots of exciting stuff I do want to highlight that Kimberly McGee our executive director this year. She received the 2023 Vicki Maddox downtowner of the year By downtown Colorado Inc for her leadership in progressing Longmont's downtown Forward so I just want to we're under amazing leadership And I think I hit my seven minute mark So now I'm gonna pass the baton or over to Valerie Dodd executive director for next light Can you hear me? Am I live? Am I good? Okay? Thank you Chris for the introduction So I'm probably not gonna share any new insights. You've heard the themes Hopefully what you'll take away is that there is alignment across all of these organizations Here supporting you all and getting us aligned from an economic platform perspective So I am representing LEDP today. So long month economic development partnership. So next slide, please I'll just give you a little not. Thank you so much. So who what is LEDP? It's an organization comprised of community members community leaders business owners, etc And really the whole purpose of it is to align on that strong economic development strategy and to make sure that we are aligned and We're advocating for the changes necessary for us to really create that vibrant and inclusive local economy So not to offend anyone everyone's got an idea of what economic development is right So please pardon the lesson, but the way we think about it and really focus our work is in three categories Business Workforce Placemaking, that's all you've really heard about so far We here are to doing the work to help in these areas. So specifically from a business perspective It really is our job LEDP to help attract businesses retain them Help them expand support startups, etc Because that does create jobs that does really further and help that vibrant economy that we're all striving for Second and obviously very related to that is the workforce. We have to you've heard it from everyone else already We've got to attract great talent the right talent and the right skills to support the jobs that we're also trying to attract We got to retain those people and thought it's all hand. Sorry And then we need to also ensure that we have a development plan to get our local workforce our students, etc Ready to go fill the jobs that we need and then lastly and equally important and related is the Placemaking Harold spent a lot of time talking about that and a lot of the focus on that and it's ensuring that we have a you know Very amenity rich community We already have outstanding infrastructure. We have award-winning utilities. We have fiber everywhere We're working on our transportation plan So really we've got a lot of things that are going really well for us and that's something that we want to make sure that we support So I'm not going to go through this. I think we're a little short on time, but what is LEDP doing specifically? Excuse me. A lot of work is going towards marketing the city There's a really nice website that we use to promote ourselves globally locally nationally. What have you? Also, we even do direct mail campaigns out to prospective businesses as well as to Certain personas or type of employees that we would want bring to bring to the community All right, I'm going to keep going. So what type of businesses are we trying to attract? This is every evolving We're refreshing it. We're making sure that we have alignment with our regional partners throughout the metro area So that we're attracting, you know, a large number of those congruent type businesses But here you see the four categories on the right hand side We think these make sense for us. We're excelling in many of these areas already But this is our primary focus. There's also a lot of growth in these areas as well One other thing that we try to do strategically is make sure that we're aligning with any federal grants or incentives There's the new chip at which is trying to encourage more semi conducting Manufacturing in this country. And so we are now talking about how do we support that industry here in Longmont? So Economically, what are we seeing a lot of uncertainty? I know Harold talked about uncertainty in the budget We've got uncertainty as well. When you go, you know read articles I could find a thousand is like, okay, we're going it into a recession. No, we're not 20% chance. We are who knows so I would say uncertainty is certain But I think a few things that we do know tailwinds things are starting to look pretty good here So we've got a pretty strong regional economy with a nine billion dollar GRP We have low unemployment. That's mostly a great thing. Sometimes it's a challenging thing We have high labor force participation and the housing market has a long way to go But it is starting to lose it a little bit. We've got a couple hundred houses in the inventory as of last month We continue to see the headwinds Harold talked about them Again housing. We've got some improvement. We have a long way to go And then we have the higher cost of goods and groceries groceries are up two to six percent depending what aisle you're on and then we have continuing supply chain issues and then I think every news feed that I get shows that we have a minute by minute worsening Global unrest and uncertainty throughout the world So what are we hearing? We'd love to look at surveys and data. So we're hearing that workforce concerns You've heard it already are really around finding talent attracting talent and retaining talent and as Harold also mentioned Sorry, Harold. I'm just repeating a lot of what you said But really all of these do tie into housing so all roads lead to housing and obviously it's a big focus of Many most of you in the room and also throughout leadership community so this is the final slide yay and What I want to do is kind of outline the imperatives that we led PC for economic prosperity And I loved Chris talking about data. He had me at data It's really important. We understand where we are so that we know where we need to go So we can't be biased in our opinions. We need to go look at the data and say, yeah, we have a gap here Or oh, we're excelling here. How do we do more of it? So we've got to be date data driven Secondly emergency preparedness Harold once again at this city puts a lot of focus around emergency preparedness We're continually having meetings. Our most recent one was what if we had a cyber attack? We all you know fear the fires. We fear so many things. So we all have to make sure that we're really disciplined in this aspect more specifically Is an absolute imperative as a safe community Thank you. Is that chief artists for ensuring that we continue to invest in public safety, especially with the cameras and other things Strong educational system. I think we do a terrific job there We need to make sure that we continue to invest in that and that we have the curriculum that supports the type of jobs that we need to fill and then place making lots of cool stuff going on with microtransportation and other things and Yeah, first and main all that housing for all duh and then lastly the workforce development which I've already kind of alluded to and then all of this has to be done with a mindset towards sustainability and equity and then finally The most important thing and the one thing I implore all of us to really always be good at and that is making sure We're aligned and that we don't have gaps and efforts or overlap between efforts Really important that we all align on those core things those imperatives that are going to give us that vibrant economy Thank you and now Scott cook. Oh There you are Scott. All right. Thank you Valerie. I Would try more and expand quicker But the cost may get more difficult to ramp up fast enough to warrant trying new things in new ways and in new places This is a quote we received from a from a participant in the chamber's recent business climate study While a majority of respondents told us that they were optimistic about the future. We also heard comments like this Though there is a healthy economic optimism from our business community There are challenge that we must collectively be aware of if we want to help Longmont prosper The chamber embarked on its first ever business climate study earlier this year to understand the challenges Longmont businesses owner owners were facing We partnered with the Latino Chamber of Commerce which assisted us with translation and distribution of the survey To our Spanish speaking businesses as well I'd like to extend a special thank you to Carla and John at the Latino Chamber for their participation in this effort Today Today, we're gonna look at the survey results through three different lenses Optimism of the business owner challenges and opportunities for businesses and what areas of leadership are needed to support our businesses In all we had 163 responses, which is a very strong response for our first effort in our size of community and membership Let's first take a look at business optimism The Longmont Chamber board our Longmont Chamber board member Kerry McDermott with the school district Correlated how optimistic businesses are about the economic outlook of our community by their geographic location in Longmont as You can see the South Main and the downtown areas expressed the highest rate of optimism While it's important to note that all areas were above neutral neutral and generally optimistic Business is located in the North Main North Main corridor expressed the least amount of optimism in the community This finding has led the LEDP and the Longmont Chamber to embark on a new effort for our North Main businesses That will include quarterly meetings next year to discuss their specific challenges Including topics such as crime enterprise zones and traffic To begin our study we hosted several focus group sessions with business owners to make sure We were asking the right questions before collecting the survey responses seven key challenges emerged from the focus groups in The survey that followed we asked respondents to rank their concerns about each issue on a scale of one to seven We see anything from five to seven as a very significant concern and three to five as a significant concern as you can see inflation is seen as very as a very Significant concern and almost all others rank as significant Our ability to tackle a problem like inflation either as a single organization or a network of organizations is limited We can however take action as a community on other significant concerns raised by our businesses The top challenges currently facing our business community include an increasing regulatory climate The cost of benefits and a business owner's ability to recruit and retain qualified talent as we've heard so much this morning on already one survey taker said Minimum wage increases and forced benefit payments by the state are crippling small business There is no end in sight and it seems like the state has lost touch with the reality of running a small business. I Will mention in this quote as with several others that responded This relates to the many new state regulations and not specifically to any actions from the city of Longmont We included optional demographic questions in our survey, which were completed by 93 percent of survey respondents This allowed us to observe some interesting trends in how own business ownership size and years in business affected the challenges that are being experienced Businesses owned by women most often mentioned the need for childcare and affordable housing availability Smaller businesses were much more likely to report that they struggle with the rising cost of wages and benefits than did their larger counterparts We extracted a lot of data from this study and I'm not going to go into all of it here But you will have the opportunity later on to download the fight the full report following this presentation Just as we identified the challenges facing Longmont businesses. We wanted to assess what they see as opportunities for collective help From the economic partners and a community at large Many responses came up, but the ones that were cited the most include political advocacy Affordable housing networking opportunities and education This feedback is vital to our organization as we determine new strategy strategies to lean in even more with the work that we are already doing So what do business owners want from their city leadership for those of you here that our candidates are working with campaigns and tent the slightest for you Businesses want a faster permitting process for residential and commercial developments businesses want more mixed use developments Businesses do not want policies like rent control and minimum wage Again, I won't mention all of these but my takeaway is that the business community wants to get creative in tackling these challenges I personally do not see the not in my backyard ethos, but a collaborative. Yes, let's do that together in our community Finally, let me tell you what our organization or what our organization is doing with this information Over the last few years the Longmont Chamber has increased our presence as a political advocate and the voice of business in Longmont and we will continue to do so We are expanding our educational opportunities to help businesses be more creative, adaptable, visible and prepared for the challenges of business ownership Finally, we are doing more to engage with our community in our discourse including this state of the city event We hope that you continue to engage with us in events like this. Thank you We will now have time for questions and answers for this panel led by Karen Stallard again from our Chamber staff Great. Give it up one more time for the boss man himself of the Longmont Chamber He loves it when I have a microphone and get to just embarrass him. It's great And thank you to all of our partners I think it's important for all of us as economic development entities within the city of Longmont too In fact show to all of you lovely people here today They are in fact three separate entities the Longmont downtown development authority the Longmont economic development partnership And the Longmont chamber just to name three of the 13 that make up the advanced Longmont partners So in the flesh everybody give it up one more time I'm tastefully buying you all time to submit questions a few of you already did So thank you so much for doing that again saying qr code just choose who you'd like the questions to go to Valerie the first one's actually for you. So scott you can hand over the microphone What does recruitment of businesses to Longmont incentivizing both large and small businesses to come to Longmont When we have such a tight labor market and housing market It's a tough question to answer. I do believe That you have you have to have the businesses in order to get the people and you need the people for the growth You need the people for the taxes etc so It's one of those wildly and widely debated issue is how much growth does the community want and how much is right And it ties into housing and everything else. So it has to be a really balanced mix But we need to Really focus on bringing the right type of businesses that really also the most important thing that I don't think I covered in my slides Was when you bring in some new a few new critical strategic businesses They get very dependent on all of you in this room. They need construction help. They need financial services They need employment placement services, etc. So really sometimes bringing in You know, the right strategic businesses helps fuel the economy with all of you and our locally owned businesses Excellent, uh chris. I've got one for you. I know you guys get this question a lot at the ldda So with all of the development planned in the downtown district, what are the plans around parking? I was I was waiting for that question on parking. He knows Yeah, so we we talk about parking every month as a board We put a lot of thought into this and it's a Ongoing discussion we've as I mentioned earlier. We've prioritized funding into the microtransit strategy That's a short term tactic But that does help us through some of the construction particularly with the hotel development at the end of the year that's going to start I'm happening There's we've invested in two parking garages We've invested in signage. I think a lot of it is just helping our community be aware Where to park what's available? So we've invested in strategic wayfinding signage to say like there's available parking here Um, I think a lot of it is perception. We have a perceived parking problem. We don't have an actual parking problem um, so It's just helping the community Understand that I think it's um You know, it cost forty thousand dollars to To redevelop a parking spot. It's really expensive to build parking garages And I think what we have to understand is we have scarcity in our downtown We've got scarcity in regards to land So we're trying to be strategic with every inch of land throughout our district and by building Parking it takes away from the opportunity cost of what else could be that could better serve our community We understand parkings of an issue and it's a continued discussion Thank you. Scott this question will be for you. We're going to shift gears a little bit The longmont chamber represents nearly 700 businesses, but within that we represent also 25 000 employees This relates a little bit more to that group Can you share your thoughts and the chamber's thoughts on the high cost and limited access to families who need access to child care in longmont? Yeah, this is another very difficult question that in some ways is related to housing as well. And so what we're seeing from our Business owners is that there's a there's a high cost of housing But another huge increase that they're seeing is with child care Not only is is the cost going up, but also the availability So this can really have an impact on employers If folks aren't able to come to work because of child child care concerns things like that We did look earlier this year at a proposal from several of those in the community that put something together to Tackle this issue. There was a number of different things that would do from property taxes To help raise money for this issue We did not get to the point of supporting that because it did not make it past the Actually our county commissioners But that it was something that we were very seriously looking and we would love to look at other Options to help our businesses with this area for sure Great and we're going to close with a question for all three of you leaning right into the next component of this Which is going to be sitting down with our actual city council candidates. So we're going to talk about a ballot question In order scott since you've got the mic, we'll start with you and then just go down to the line What is your position on item 3d on the ballot? Which is the longmont center for arts and entertainment? Yeah, another hard question. There's only hard questions. I guess today So the center for arts and entertainment the chamber actually has had a long Part in this process. We began back in 2019 with the feasibility study On this project The chamber is also very aware of the great impact that the arts bring to the community Especially since we're businesses looking at this economically there are many studies that show That a vibrant arts community really does a lot for a community economically And so we've been a supporter And of this process for a number of different years We supported the question actually being on the ballot as well When we got to the point of actually supporting or not the project We actually said no to that and I would say the only reason that we did that is because of what you've heard some today And that is on the property tax questions proposition hh is on the ballot this year There are a lot of unknowns for our business owners right now and I don't have to tell business owners that businesses like to operate in an environment of stability and right now we have a number of different unstable areas From across the globe to things that are going on at the state level And so we listened to our members, but it was a very difficult decision for us On this one, but we did in the end oppose it Being that I am a city employee. I am going to pass on this question and So I take a I wear multiple hats. I've got the chamber hat the ldda hat Front-range community college hat and community hat and small business owner hat. So I'm going to Say that ldda hasn't taken a formal formal stance. We we typically don't get into public policy Decisions formally so kind of removing that and saying christ mcgillivray as an individual I support this project I do see that there's concerns around three very important needs for our community on the ballot So I could see our communities looking and assessing these three big needs that we need and we can't But also being mindful that all three will increase Sales tax and so it's going to be one of those things that I personally feel that there's going to be A lot of us kind of looking at those three measures saying what is the greatest need for the community? and so Those are my thoughts Thank you And just a friendly reminder that everyone should have received their ballots in the mail this week We love a civically engaged public. So We're grateful that you're here to ask good questions and educate yourselves as well Harold you mentioned that if you were still around you might be willing to tap into one You might be able to speak to this one as well. It relates to the library Someone's cited that they have read that longmont has the smallest library in relation to a city of our size This was directed to everyone including herald. Can you speak to? The resources of the library how it gains access to folks in our community And just if you want to speak about the ballot measure for the library as well, you are welcome to So I can't speak to the ballot measure because of I'm obviously a city employee. So similar to valerie. We can't talk about that. What I can't talk about is the library itself When we did the needs analysis on the library what we did find is that yes, it is one of the smaller libraries For a city our size We also don't necessarily have the annexes that other communities have And from a funding perspective The funding is lower than some of the other communities in the library and when we look at it from a budget perspective I'll tell you it's kind of when we make decisions. I think there was a question about Wayfinding when we're working through type budgets every year. It's kind of do you spend money on wayfinding? Do you and so we have added positions to the library? But when you have that limited funding source that's been the constraining factor over time And from the economic partners anything to add related to the library in long month I can't tell you turning it all. I'm just going to say data. Just look at the data. Yeah, excellent Um, okay There is another we'll do probably just one more. That was a very quick answer. Thank you, herald Um This is also for everyone herald you can jump back up there if you want, but I don't know if you're going to weigh in on this one how Do we as economic partners and the city justify subsidizing low wage businesses to come here when workers can't afford Housing or to be able to find housing. How do we incentivize higher wage businesses? So probably you valer. Can you speak to both the recruitment of smaller local businesses and some of our more primary employers? I'm just going to say herald is solving for the affordable and attainable housing crisis No, um, but in all seriousness It's it's a very real thing, but we do need those people We need them at smugglers We need many other places many of you in the room need some of those entry level employees So it has to be solved. We're all committed to that and I think we're aligned around that You know just by virtue of what we shared here today. So um, again, it's a balance and it's it's difficult I'll just add from a workforce development perspective, you know, when we have the smugglers and these Larger employers in our community We also need to be able to have the infrastructure to Develop the employees at a local level and that's something I'm really proud of That front-range community college has the only center center for integrating manufacturing in the state that houses The advanced manufacturing programs that actually prepares for real jobs to solve smugglers You know, they operate on they use the phantic robotics, which is the exact robotics that we train at the center So I think education in workforce development and having that foundation in place So that when the employers move and operate in long month, we could address those needs So the The short answer is we actually have wage requirements when we provide incentives under our city policies So it's not like we can just incentivize anything And depending on the location as we started growing Beyond the boulder county line in the weld county line. We actually look at the median wage The average wage of both counties and depending on where the business is located The wage has to be above that level so that we can So that we can incentivize that so we just can't under policy incentivize any business They have to meet certain wage requirements And then to talk a little bit about smugglers what made that so interesting is when we looked at the number It was over the weld county wage significantly But a lot of people think those wage structures are spread out where you have these high wage salaries as part of that project That project was actually pretty concentrated in terms of their entry level wage was really high And so you didn't see the things that you normally see And when you look at wages across an organization And then we look at the needs within the community in terms of the incentives So one of the things that we needed we saw is with the closure of longmont foods We had a large number of people in our community that no longer had jobs that they could get here They actually had to try travel to weld county and other places to fill those jobs And so in that case we looked at the need in the community based on skill sets and people that weren't able to get jobs here And we looked at the wage structure And it all had to be in conformance with the policy that requires certain wages before we can incentivize projects And you finished right at 10 30 herald my goodness. It's like he's done it for years That's our time everyone. We are going to take a quick break And then we are going to start with our candidate interviews. So again, those will be recorded You can continue to submit questions. We got lots and we will answer all of them following up after this event Thank you all so much With the candidate interviews with individuals who are running for city council and mayor today I'm stacey corne. I handle advocacy and public policy for the long line area chamber of commerce And so i'm pleased to be a part of this Event today My job is to read the rules. So i'm over here by you all I'm reading you the rules Okay When your seat is called Please come on stage and sit in the available chairs When it's your turn, please sit in the chair next to the moderators Okay, so the order that will be going in today will be mayor first then at large ward one and ward three You will be asked three to four questions from the list that you received from scott You will have one minute to respond to each question There will be lights on stage to let you know when your time is almost done and when you need to have completed your answer The moderator will also assist with this after answering all the questions at the end of the interview You have 30 seconds for final remarks Let's run through an example of lights. Do we have our light guy? Not right now green. Yes. Thank you We have the green light. We have the yellow light And we have the red light Pretty impressive there Okay, so are there any questions from you all before we get started Okay, awesome. We look forward to hearing you all And we'll carry on with the next part of the program All right. Thank you stacey. We will begin with the the mayoral candidates. So If I believe we have two mayoral candidates if you'd come up and join us on these seats up here All right, and Ethan will start with you. So we'll have you just come right up here up front Okay Ethan please state your name and the seat that you're running for and then we'll get right into the questions Ethan on green My name is Ethan on green running for mayor of longmont All right. Our first question on minimum wage In our comprehensive survey findings business owners reported that an increase in minimum wage to 25 per hour by 20 28 Would negatively impact their ability to provide benefits Forced them to increase consumer costs and possibly require businesses to operate with fewer employees Large businesses indicated that this will be difficult. Small businesses are concerned actually about survival What is your position on increasing minimum wage over time to 2028? And what is your position on boulder county's desire to begin implement? Implementation on january 1st 2024 Well increasing their minimum wage to 25 by 2028 is too fast too high My position on minimum wage is it should be pinned to no more than the rate of inflation I think half the rate of inflation would be ideal. So that's a slightly desolidating influence on inflation but um If it increases faster than inflation, that's going to be an added inflationary pressure And going as high as 25 dollars. I don't I think would be devastating for businesses in the economy It'll put a lot of workers out of work in fact Transportation Some argue that our infrastructure upgrades tend to be more reactive than proactive How would you balance the need for quality roads capacity and other planning needs? Well, I'd like you to define more what you mean by reactive rather than proactive But I think that The current mayor's position that we should Keep paying the tax to bring a train from denver to la mont even though that train will never be built and probably never come here Is the wrong position? I think it's misguided and ignores our greater priorities, which should be improving regional transportation to a place that don't have any currently like lions estates park The carbon valley even grilly. We don't have any buses that go to these places on a daily basis I would shift our priority to focus where we don't have Existing transportation, including to laborers in la mont where the bus doesn't go We do have a train that goes to i mean a bus that goes to denver already. So building a train is redundant We should repeal that tax And I think there's a plan for another Funding for another train in 2024 when we still haven't built the first one So it's a big mess and we should shift our priorities Okay, if you could do one thing to improve la mont, what would that be? Well, I think the biggest need is to bring more rationality to the energy policy You probably can't see this, but this is a chart of the looming energy cliff in 2030 You can go to my website ethanforlaumont.com class energy and See this in my policy in greater depth But the current mayor Supports increasing or raising the rates seven percent Next year meanwhile, there's still not a plan to actually achieve The goal 100 carbon fuel electricity by 2030 Half of our electricity or more comes from coal currently that's all going to be turned off In 2030 and there's really no plan currently to replace it with Renewable energy Sufficiently to meet the demand That's going to increase costs even more I do a plan to bring more renewable energy to la mont But I think 100 by 2030 Is extremely ambitious and may not be achievable. Okay, we'll go to the next question. That's the time The 2023 city ballot questions Please select one of the following and tell us why you support or oppose this ballot question The center for arts and entertainment the library expansion or the recreation and ymca land swap for affordable housing Choose one Um the performing arts center. It's a great idea, but It's another example of where we need better leadership on council in the mayor's office because there's a lot of detail In that proposal, we don't know what the the plan is to build Or the design or where it's going to be built All those are important questions that still have yet to be decided And so I'm not going to be voting for this even though I think it's a great idea because we need to see those details before We agree to another tax increase Okay, thank you. You now have 30 seconds for any final 30 seconds for any final remarks Well, I have master's degree in environmental leadership. I've won numerous awards for leadership. I served in americor I have not been in politics involved in politics before And that's a good thing because I'm not corrupt not tied to uh corrupt party establishments like my opponent is And so please vote for me for change And freedom and prosperity for all. I have a plan to lower taxes I will uh repeal the tax on the feud And please visit my website ethan for law might dot com. Thank you All right. Thank you very much, Ethan All right, Joan All right, Joan, can you please state your name and what position are you Running for? Thank you, chris. I'm Joan peck running for reelection of mayor of longwood All right question number one on minimum wage In our comprehensive survey findings business owners reported that an increase in a minimum wage to 25 an hour by 2028 would negatively impact their ability to provide benefits Forced them to increase consumer costs and possibly require businesses to operate with fewer employees Large businesses indicate that this will be difficult small businesses are concerned about survival What is your position on increasing minimum wage over time to 2028? And what is your position on boulder county's desire to begin implementation on january 1st of 2024? Um, I think everybody deserves a livable wage But I think this is not the year to put it on the ballot or I'm sorry. It won't be on the ballot to agree with The boulder county on increasing it this year I don't know about 2028 and 25 an hour because we're not there in the way the landscape changes Every single year. I I don't want to make a prediction for that year I do know that nonprofits are against it because they rely upon donations And grants to pay for their employees and donations have not been coming in As they were before uh, covet. I also think that, um For me tipping is a problem if the manager of the entity Deducts the tips from their wage Um, then they're not getting the minimum wage anyway And this has to do with a credit cards and tips going on Credit cards, so I think that that needs to be looked at. I'm not sure it's equitable Question two transportation Some argue that our infrastructure upgrades tend to be more reactive rather than proactive How would you balance the need for quality roads capacity and other planning needs? I don't think they're reactive at all I'm on dr. Cog and I work with phil greenwald quite a bit in the transportation department And it's much of all of our upgrades are multiple year studies Looking for grants. They have to pass the tip project, which is a sub regional discussion and basically a Vying for the grants and the federal dollars to help us with it So I think we have a great transportation department who is very very Consistent with looking at engineering our city for traffic studies As far as the regional goes. Yes I am still vying for our northwest corridor And the reason for that is because the front range passenger rail is supposed to connect our northwest corridor We can find out in june if that's going to happen And if it does not I will I'm already working on a strategy strategy to exit Fast tracks That part of our Time has expired. Oh, it still looks green to me. Oh Okay, improving longmont if you could do one thing to improve longmont. What would that be? it would be To be able to hire more people and have everybody be able to have a home to live in The unhoused and the homeless Okay question for a city ballot questions Please select one of the following and tell us if you support or oppose the bill and why Center for arts and entertainment library expansion or recreation and ymca land swap with affordable housing I can't pick just one and the reason for that is that we we studied these in length on council and with operations I want you to pick one by your vote What is it you would like to see in our city and vote to tax yourselves? Council is not taxing you at all or asking you if you think one of these initiatives is worth your tax dollars For the future of our city You know, I was 29 when my mom moved out. I'm sorry when I moved to longmont and The senior center was on the ballot. What did I care about a senior center? But I was smart enough to know that we need something for the seniors in the future So I voted for it and look where we are today You now have 30 seconds for final words I want to be on council because I think we're a great city You heard our city manager and the way we're moving if we don't move and grow and Build for the future then we will die and We've seen too many cities that this has happened to in the northeast And I don't want us to go there We have a lot of immigrants migrants coming because of climate because of wars, etc We need to be prepared. We need to educate who we can Thank you vote for john Thank you, john All right. Thank you mayoral candidates. We will now move to candidates for city council at large So if you would join us on stage Steve you're first And the microphone is right over there Can you state your name in the position you're running for please? My name is steven altula, and I'm running for longmont city council at large Great first question Please select one of the following and tell us if you support or oppose the bill and why Center for arts and entertainment library expansion or recreation and ymca land swap with affordable housing I am against the ymca land swap and the affordable housing The city of longmont currently has 2700 affordable housing units I actually call those subsidized housing and not just affordable because I believe that we are Subsidizing it and paying it out of taxpayer money One of the problems I have with the affordable housing the way it's set up now Is if someone's income is low enough They they get half their rent paid for But there's no incentive for them to ever increase their rent. They can live there for the next 50 years If anything, we're enabling people and we're encouraging them to not make more money What I'd like to see happen is that they be allowed in for three or four years With the prerequisite that they go to front range and take classes Or they work with a local business and a mentoring program to increase their own worth And then they can rotate out and other people can rotate in and we won't need more affordable housing units Thank you Thank you Question two is on housing Our employers are saying that hiring challenges have been exacerbated by the cost of housing at all levels We currently lack the supply to meet the demand of housing that employees need Housing is costly due to the lack of availability the cost of land cost of building and the amount of time that it takes to develop a project The city currently has an affordable housing plan and is working on an attainable housing plan What is your approach to housing and is there something that the city should be involved in? I actually just answered half of that One of the reasons that housing is so expensive is because of the city council Builders are charged about 40 thousand dollars just to be able to plum into the sewer lines They're charged an in-luffy. It's it's been eight dollars a square foot Now it's going up to 13 and a half If you have a two thousand square foot house that would sell for six hundred thousand dollars It's now going to sell for six hundred and sixty thousand dollars That raises the mortgage by ten percent If the person that buys the house wants to rent it out it raises rents by ten percent So I think a lot of our Costs of having housing too expensive comes from the city council itself I've made a recommendation to the city although I never heard back from them that they encourage homeowners in longmont to be able to rent out vacant rooms It will give them homeowner more money to help pay for their mortgage and it'll be a lower less expensive rent for whoever moves in Thank you Question number three is on homelessness and public safety Homelessness and crime are two concerns of our business community. What are your thoughts on the impacts to the community and to businesses? Do you have any ideas for addressing both? Of course, I have ideas I've had my own businesses for 35 years and I think that businesses are the lifeblood of every community Businesses need to be protected so they can succeed and grow The first thing I'd like to see happen Especially in north longmont, but it's going to come to south longmont also I'd like to make an ordinance that all homeless people and their possessions Have to stay at least 100 feet away from a retail location And 500 feet away from the school This will enable employees and customers to be able to go into the businesses and conduct business or do their job Without any fear Was there a crime in that also? Yes I think longmont actually needs its own jail When boulder built a jail, they had 85 000 people We have 100 000 people now. We can no longer take our criminals to boulder And that's why they're being released with no punishment whatsoever Whether it's a car theft or shoplifting and my time is up. Thank you. You beat me to it But you do get 30 second. Oh, I'm sorry question for regulatory environment A longmont chamber advocacy priority is communicating the cumulative impact of new regulations Taxes and fees that businesses are required to attend to one of our members said that business is so hard Everything we touch becomes a battle. Do you share this concern and or how would you reply to this member? And again, like I stated businesses are the life but blood of every community Small business hires more employees than all the large businesses put together. We need to support our small businesses One of the things I also think that our city budget is way over bloated We've grown our city budget has gone up 58 percent in seven years With only a seven percent increase in population I'd like to see a 10 percent across the board cut In the budget for the city with a corresponding 10 cut in sales tax One of the things that we'll do is encourage more people to buy more because they're spending less for tax It will also bring people from surrounding cities to longmont to buy something because our tax rate will be lower out here I hope I answered all Thank you You now get 30 seconds for any final words steve Oh, well, first of all steve alcher My website is www.steve the number for longmont.com As I said, I've been in business for 35 years I spent 35 years working over 60 hours a week What I'd like to see is we make jobs available for people And then it's like our constitution everybody's created equal what they do with that opportunity is up to them If they work and help themselves succeed great and if they don't that's also their choice Thank you very much Thank you Hello, becca. Can you please state your name and what position are you running for becca venterella longmont city council at large Question one 2023 city ballot questions Please select one of the following and tell us if you support or oppose the bill and why Center for arts and entertainment library expansion or recreation and ymca land swap with affordable housing I have been out in the community knocking doors often and I'm starting to learn a lot more about the concerns of the people and More information on these ballot issues Than when I further when I first read them in my thoughts in the beginning One thing I found interesting is that with the ymca and the Rec center is the affordable housing piece. I didn't realize until recently That the cost for those affordable housing units will be significantly less Then if we just were to go and build them Ourself on that plot of land. So that's very interesting I think if they would have been separated out and it was the y and then the rec center I think we get a lot more pull for the rec center but Speaking from all the people that I have spoken with is the big concern is property taxes. It's sales tax We are all Concerned about that and I know for me and my family It's a big concern. And so I'm not sure where I land on if I'll vote for them or if I'm not I'm still working out the math Question two housing Our employers are saying that hiring challenges have been Exasperated by the cost of housing at all levels We currently lack the supply to meet the demand of housing that our employees need Housing is costly due to the lack of availability cost of land cost of building And the amount of time that it takes to develop a project The city currently has an affordable housing plan and is working on an attainable housing plan What is your approach to housing? Is this something the city should be involved in? Absolutely because we deal with zoning and regulation and Who buys what property? So I think looking at high density housing is important because we can maximize the space that we have So we're not pulling an infill. We're not pulling from our open space on the outer skirts of longmont My husband and I moved here because of a townhome development that came in and otherwise We would not have been able to afford a single family home by just moving here and I love the community feel of it I love that everyone's in this tight-knit community and my kids play outside with all the other neighbors So I think supporting more of that versus single family homes is important Um Thank you question three homelessness and public safety Homelessness and crime are two concerns of our business community What are your thoughts on the impacts to the community and businesses? Do you have any ideas for addressing both of these? Well, I learned a lot tonight. I think what the city is planning to do with vision dero is Exciting and I like the idea of cameras So firstly I would support our city staff and all the work that they're doing for our community So that we can um create more security in a way that's not going to take as much manpower to do And then continue to learn and grow and connect with our community and find out what their exact issues are and their needs are So that we can support them as they go forward All right question four regulatory environment A longmont chamber advocacy prior priority is communicating the cumulative impact Of new regulations taxes and fees that businesses are required to attend to One of our members says business is just so hard Everything we touch becomes a battle. Do you share these concerns and or how would you reply to this member? I do my husband is a mechanic and he works for the family business. His dad has a garage in boulder and um, he shares these concerns because Whenever the taxes were raised the sales tax was raised He didn't realize that until you looked at an invoice and he had been charging people a lower rate So then he was having to cover that cost So I think he from his his stance if if communication was better if people reached out if people had Hey, this is what's happening. This is what we're raising it to then he wouldn't incur any further costs going forward Okay 30 seconds final words Most of you know that i'm here because of my cousin She was murdered at the michigan state university mass shooting this february 13th That was the catalyst for me getting involved in politics because I knew I had to use my voice To bring about change in some way or the other But as I've mentioned my my husband's a business owner I myself am a business owner and um as a hairdresser So I do understand the concerns then the positives and the negatives of being a business owner And I hope that I can be that voice in our community as well as Bring multiple people's time Thank you back. Thank you All right. Thank you candidates. Uh, we will now do candidates for ward one if you would join us on stage And Let's see. Nia. You will be first Give me just a moment to find my place here. So all right Nia, would you please state your name and the position that you're running for? Absolutely. My name is Nia Wasink. My pronouns are she her and I'm running for ward one long month city council All right. Thank you First question under doing business in longmont. What is the city's role in attracting and supporting existing businesses in longmont given the high cost of doing business here? I don't think I can do much better than valerie did for us earlier this morning and explaining the complexities of market forces and our economy And and this is what we're experiencing right now We've got cost of living Impacting workers, which therefore means it's impacting employers and their ability to attract and retain At the same time Throttling economic development can have significant long-term costs to our community So it is this balancing act and ensuring that especially at the city level We're really looking to what types of businesses are we bringing in? How are we ensuring that we have Sustainability for those industries and for the types of jobs that they're bringing to the city Okay under transportation Some argue that our infrastructure upgrades tend to be more reactive than proactive How would you balance the need for quality roads capacity and other planning needs in longmont? Again, um, I'm going to go back to what was said earlier. Harold did such a great job explaining some of the incredible plans that we have in place Between our transportation department our transportation advisory board. We are thinking long term Not just about improving and maintaining our current infrastructure But what infrastructure needs do we have going forward as we go towards a more multimodal transportation community? So for those of us on city council a lot of that work is just ensuring that we're continuing to support what's happening We're we're also always constrained financially You know, I'm sure every one of us would love our roads to be better paved where we live Um, and we have to be very strategic in how we go about investing our limited dollars At the same time we are ensuring that we are poised to access federal grants additional funding outside of just our tax base to support these projects Okay, thank you environment Do you feel the cost of achieving net zero is worth the cost to businesses and individuals? And I want to clarify this question just for a moment. This is not in relation to The zero plan that we heard today in herald's presentation But more in regards to utilities such as as with our relationship with platt river power authority. Absolutely. Thank you for the clarification How many of you were here in 2013? Okay, most of the audience so you all saw we experienced the very real impact of climate change to our community Climate change, which is a direct result of our greenhouse gases So yes, although some of our transitions are going to not only cost us more but also require that we change our behaviors In relationship to energy It's necessary It's absolutely critical because we will continue to experience these natural disasters So not only do we have a responsibility as a city to take care of our community right now But to also think about the future So we need to stay focused on our net zero Goals and our transition plans for 2030 with platt river Okay, thank you The 2023 city ballot questions Please select one of the following and tell us if you support or oppose this ballot question and why Center for arts and entertainment the library Expansion or recreation and the ymc land swap for affordable housing I'm going to take the rec center deal because it's both the most complex And allows us to leverage our tax dollars the most significantly. So real quick Overview it actually has three specific components Upgrades to the the quail rec center over here some maintenance that's been Needed a totally new rec center out at dry creek 90,000 square feet of a rec facility Which is pretty amazing and then this land swap deal which will give centennial pool Which will likely close down in the next two to three years to the ymca and the ymca property to the city The ymca will be not just building a significant rec center that will be available in a joint membership to city residents But also this affordable housing and a really significant expansion in their early childhood center all of this These are the topics that we keep talking about we need housing. We need early childhood access So this is the the ballot measure that addresses so many of those needs Okay, thank you. Yeah, you now have 30 seconds for for final remarks I just want to say thank you all for sticking with us for how many hours and being so civically engaged These are the important topics that come about For us and city council and the decisions that we're going to be making going forward My background is in nonprofits. So I have relationships with many of our service providers, which I hope to leverage for our city good And just love to continue to hear your voice and quick shout out to kathy krauter who helped bring me to longmont eight years ago Thank you, d'you Diane you're next Can you just state your name in the seat that you're running for? I'm diane christ and i'm running for the ward one city council seat Which is being evacuated by tim waters Thank you question number one doing business in longmont What is the city's role in attracting and supporting existing businesses in longmont given the high cost of doing business here? One of the things the city can do is to reduce the cost of doing business in town It's counterintuitive to think that raising taxes will raise revenue and actually Revenue is related to production So the more that businesses produce and individuals produce the more revenue the city acquires through taxation One of the things that the federal reserve is doing now on the national level is they are Using a financial policy to try to bring down inflation and the other side of that would be deregulation and Best business practices when I say deregulation we could also say lowering property and sales taxes these Strategies worked in the 1980s. I don't know if you remember in the 1970s. We had super high inflation And um in the 80s They worked on it nationally To bring down inflation Thank you. They they work historically they work Thank you question number two is on transportation Some argue that our infrastructure upgrades tend to be more reactive than proactive How would you balance the needs for quality roads capacity and other planning needs? In 2021 I was the sole candidate talking about transportation and I'm happy that we're talking about it more in every forum One of the things that we have done I'm the vice chair of the transportation board and we ushered in vision zero And also under phil greenwald have gotten a three-year commitment from the city for microtransit within the town Transportation has a lot to do with affordability In that if you have to buy a car that doubles your budget if you're a young Entrepreneur or a young creative or also if you're a senior So this can really put a pinch on the affordability and So when we're talking affordability, we're talking transportation Now, I think when you talk about reactivity you're thinking About paved streets vision zero will push a lot of the commuter traffic to the edges of town creating a soft center Traffic in town will be more reasonable softer and streets will be in better shape. Thank you Uh, the next question's on environment Do you feel that the cost of achieving net zero is worth the cost to businesses and individuals? And remember that the net zero is in our partnership with power with flat river power authority not the vision zero for transportation Thank you The electrify longmont came and spoke to the transportation board and what was prevalent in that conversation Is that we're actually going to have to accelerate our coal usage to meet the electrical requirements for the city That and we will have a penalty a coal penalty if you will by 2030 They're saying this might be reduced by 2045 or 2050 And that's 22 years in the future So I would say no Um, the cost is not a good situation at this time Now, uh, what does work is uh hyperloop is down in Pueblo. They have a test track there They think hyperloop will be available Within the next 15 years They're also working on it for cargo and if you read Alan James white paper on cargo usage with an hyperloop. He says the emissions savings will be massive So technology is the way forward with the environment. Thank you Question four is related to the 2023 city ballot questions Please select one of the following and tell us if you support or oppose the bill and why Center for arts and entertainment library expansion or the recreation and ymca land swap with affordable housing Now it's not a time to raise taxes. So I am opposing all three initiatives Now under under that caveat, I think that all taxpayers should have access to library and recreation services So I support Renting some of these blighted buildings that have a lot of available parking And putting recreation services and library services the extension services there Most of the cost of those services actually are in employee costs When it comes to arts and entertainment that is one area that It will need a foundation or a sponsor to succeed You know if you think about karnagy hall And so that's something that probably eventually as taxpayers we will have to subsidize or I should say support In time and I think give us three years and we'll work out of these economic difficulties and be ready for something like that Thank you. You now have 30 seconds for any final words. Well, thank you First let me say That the city runs two years behind the local economy, you know, they're doing property tax assessments now those will come The pay for those will come due in 2025 So in some ways the city has not felt the pinch of the last two years that the local economy has This is important because I think they're ill prepared for what's about to come This election season I've seen more business oriented candidates than ever before and I believe we can bring our Talent and skills to the city to navigate for the next three years and bring us out of this Thank you. Thank you All right Harrison, can you please state your name and what position you're running for? Absolutely. So good morning everyone I'm Harrison Earl. I'm running for city council ward one. I will apologize in advance on color blind So cut me off on the lights if you can excellent. Thanks for letting me know Question one doing business in longmont What is the city's role in attracting and supporting existing businesses in longmont given the high costs of doing business here? In my professional career, I work with airports all over the country And what I try to do is help them recruit new airline service It is the most fun and sexy thing to go out and get new in But our number one step and what is most successful is retaining what we have And focusing on making that enormously successful And so I think I start there with what we do for existing businesses If you looked at what scott presented before it is focused on things like affordability and making sure there's affordable housing in the community It is looking at the regulatory environment recognizing it may be state in a lot of cases But what can the city do to help address those needs? And it really is listening to the community It's listening to the business owners This kind of event is phenomenal to hear that direct feedback and to be able to hear from people being able to see a survey I think is really important so that then we on the city council who may not see that pain every day in our own business I work across 10 states. So I don't see you know the actual local stuff every single minute of my day It gets brought to us and we're able to respond in ways that make all of our businesses stronger Question two transportation Some argue that our infrastructure upgrades tend to be more reactive rather than proactive How would you balance the needs for quality roads capacity and other planning needs? So I think in some cases it seems reactive because our development is not tied in with our infrastructure And so it does come down to a little bit of how we choose to develop the city going forward So that we're putting density and housing which we desperately need in places where we have strong infrastructure in place So that means closer to our arterial streets and our circulator's places. We have bus lines So that we're already using our existing infrastructure most efficiently before we start looking at upgrades Now I do think the future is multimodal for a long month I think it's really critical that we have safe streets for everybody So that is pedestrians that is single vehicle cars that is microtransit and buses and I really hope mayor pecs delivering us a train and I can't wait to see it in this community But I think all of those are very critically important vision zero is a big piece of that to make it safe for people To choose something other than getting in their car when they want to walk around and and interact with the city Not just downtown but in every part of the city Question three. Do you feel the cost of achieving net zero? Is worth the cost to do business? And individuals and this is referencing the relationship with the Platte River authority I think it's a really steep cost for us, but it's one we don't have a choice about The the effects of climate change as nea spoke about What comes if we don't make this transition is catastrophic for all of us So what can we do to then help? When we have to bear those costs have them be born equitably So this is things that harrell talked about like the cares program that helps some of our most vulnerable residents pay for it it is things like Publicizing and taking advantage more of the efficiency works programs that let us actually reduce our usage So that our costs come down even as the rates go up. It is those rebates and programs that help electrify our houses It's upgrade to our codes that let us work towards more electrification in new construction And it's kind of all of that collectively To really help bring us towards that future since we know we're going to have to get there And that minimizes the cost to any of us individually of that better future Please select one of the following and tell us if you support or oppose the bill and why? The center for arts and entertainment the library expansion Or recreation and ymca land swap with affordable housing, you know when I talked about reducing electrical usage I didn't mean the lights here. I'm going to try to do all of them in one minute here And I'll start with the library. This is one I personally support I think it's really important for our community and it's a resource that is used across this city across those two economic boundaries for everyone young and old and so expanding that is so critical for our future It helps us with our early childhood education goals It helps us with job training having those resources in the community is absolutely worth that and I support that The other two I really want to see them in this community But not at the cost that they're proposed on this year's ballot at the tax increases that are out there I'm a firm believer in the arts. I really think having an arts and entertainment center in this city would be enormously beneficial on an economic level But not at the tax rate proposed And the recreation side personally, I wish we had pulled out the ymca land swap I think that 12 million dollars would be really well spent and I'd love to see it And if I was on council, I'd push towards seeing that go forward in a different way All right 30 seconds final words Well, again, thank you everybody. Thank you chamber for putting on this event and having it with us today It's really hard to articulate a perspective in four and a half minutes So I would encourage all of you to go to my website harrison for longmont.com Learn a little bit more but also hit that contact button and tell me what you're concerned about This is I would like to learn from all of you in your perspectives and have that influence how I approach policy going forward I'm really striving to be an independent voice for common sense on our city council And that means hearing from you and helping us move for an affordable sustainable and livable future going forward Thank you all so much and make sure you vote by november 7th All right. Thank you harrison. Thank you. Thank you candidates City council award three. Please join us on stage Why don't we do a one minute break just to give the interviewers a chance to Grab some water use the restroom that kind of thing. So but if you candidates would go ahead and come up on stage We'll get started in just a moment When touched it, you're right I told them not to touch the buttons that you guys had it I was like leave it to the guy in the box up there. All right Ron, would you please state your name and the seat that you're running for please? Ron Gallegos ward three Great. We're going to start with the first question on electric and water rates The city recently announced additional increased electric rates for 2024 and 2025 According to the city's press release. The reason that increase is being done is to achieve environmental goals set by council How do we balance our environmental concerns? affordability for residents and our attractive rates for business attraction and retention during a time of high inflation and rising costs Well, I think it's one thing for a policymaker to be making policy But lots of times. I think it's been done in a vacuum So we've not really weighed the economic cost to the community and to businesses So that kind of economic analysis should take place every time I think we institute a policy that's going to be Revenue positive or negative in that sense So I think a better-formed council makes a better informed citizen base And we can figure out if these rates are justified Thank you Number two is about regulatory climate a longmont chamber advocacy priority is communicating the cumulative impact of new regulations Taxes and fees that businesses are required to attend to one of our members says business is just so hard Everything we touch becomes a battle. Do you share this concern and or how would you reply to this member? Yes, I share the concern and again, I hate to be redundant, but I don't think we look at the costs that are going to have to be passed on Or the impact to the business community and the business environment So if you're making policy but not figuring out how it's really going to impact people and what it's really going to cost in real time Looking forward two years four four years five years And what it does to the environment because if we're going to spend all this money Recruiting new businesses in the community, but on the other hand, we're creating all these regulations and having a lot of impact In terms of costs It's a lose-lose situation Thank you third question is related to housing Our employers are saying that hiring challenges have been exacerbated by the cost of housing at all levels We currently lack the supply to meet the demand of housing that employees need Housing is costly due to the lack of availability cost of land cost of building and the amount of time it takes to develop a project The city currently has an affordable housing plan and is working on an attainable housing plan What is your approach to housing? Is this something the the city should be involved in? Well, unfortunately or fortunately depending on your perspective Builders have to come to the city with their development plans and there are a whole host of regulations and hoops that they have to jump through I think one of the missed opportunities we have in this community is mixed use development and by that I mean combining residential with commercial and retail I think there are lots of areas in the community that are ripe for Harvesting in that sense in other words North main right now has a lot of strip malls that are vacant and have been vacant for a while Those sites would lend themselves to large structures Where you could have residential units on the Fourth maybe fifth six floors and then the retail and commercial on the ground floor The parking is there that would drive economic activity and better suit with the community In terms of both affordable housing and economic development. Thank you Question four is about the 2023 city ballot questions Please select one of the following and tell us if you support or oppose the ballot issue and why Center for arts and entertainment library expansion or the recreation and ymca land swap with affordable housing Since i'm running for ward three I believe that ward representatives should be advocates for their ward My ward ward three is vastly underserved in terms of services and in terms of recreational opportunity So I would oppose the new rec center in the southwest quarter of the city and rather Encourage the city to look To a proposal where we build the rec center at garden acres where there's at adequate space We could also incorporate the library A police station probably a small auditorium and meeting rooms as well There there's a adequate site that would be just east of the ball field It would have no effect on the ball fields On the soccer fields or the cricket field, but we could build a high structure and Include all the recreation needs as well as the library save that 25 million dollars. Thank you Thank you. You now have 30 seconds for any final words run Uh, I think one of the missed opportunities that we haven't talked about the day with the presentation Uh, the state of the city was is tourism. I think tourism would be a nice clean industry that we could begin to Incorporate in our city. I mean this calls for strong advocacy It calls for a mindset that says we don't go necessarily out and recruit new businesses in and have to give them incentives But rather we begin to grow what we have here. Thank you All right, gary We're going in order on the ballad a All right, gary. Please state your name. What position are you running for? Hi, my name is gary hodges. I am running for longmont city council ward three Excellent question one electric and water rates The city risk recently announced additional increased Electric rates for 2024 and 2025 According to the city's press release the reason that increases are being done is to achieve environmental goals set by the city council How do we balance our environment environmental concerns affordability for residents and our attractive rates for business attraction and retention during a time of high inflation and rising costs I guess I'd start with the question. How much are we willing to pay for vanity? Because here is the truth Nothing longmont does or doesn't do Is going to have any effect on the global climate Um, in fact pursuing these goals might actually have the preferred outcome of making these goals actually worse So city council is talking out of both sides of their mouth on on this point. So One hand talking about affordable housing on the other hand. We're gleefully raising electric rates So our power company rawhide is a competitive advantage really maybe unmatched on the front range And we should be doing everything we can to exploit this competitive advantage um Sorry slipping away, but um Our power company is so important to us and if we Just unnecessarily let the rates rise. It's going to be a negative for our city Question two regulatory climate A longmont chamber advocacy priority is communicating the accumulative impact of new regulations Taxes and fees that businesses are required to attend to one of our members says business is just so hard Everything we touch becomes a battle Do you share these concerns and or how would you reply to this member? I do share those concerns and we should be doing everything we can really to energize our business community in this city It is the golden goose that our economic foundation is based on and I I look at north main. I have a concern about empty store fronts I see there like like ron does and other cities must be facing these same issues as well So As a city, we really want to do everything we can to make longmont The place that businesses want to open Maintain relocate to make it the golden city of of the front range And to that end we should be doing everything we can that makes sense to reduce regulatory burden on our business community Our employees are saying That hiring challenges have been Exasperated by the cost of housing at every level We currently lack th