Longmont City Council Open Forum - January 19, 2021

10:18PM Jan 20, 2021

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One last city council open forum meeting. Can we please start with a roll call? I am here.

All right council members Polly Christiansen here is the head of appearing here. Marcia Martin? Here. Don't Peck. Yeah. And Rodriguez here. And waters here. Mary, you have a quorum. All right. Great. So can we go ahead and let's do the pledge. Huh? talked waters. Let's have you do it. It's lead us please, on cue. You're ready. All righty. Here we go. I pledge allegiance, allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. And to the republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty, liberty and justice. For all.

I hate to say it, that was probably the most in sync. We've been. I think Councilmember waters, if nothing else, he just got a new job. All right. Let's go ahead and go ahead and remind everybody that tonight is our forum meeting. So a little bit, we're going to be asking people to call in, and we'll give you a break. And that's the number you're gonna call in. And it's the same, like public invited to be heard, but you get five minutes. And then Council has the opportunity to respond, should they choose to do so. So let's move on to the COVID update, I believe jobs Ah, here.

I am mayor, thank you very much. Thanks, council members. And I think someone's got my slides. And I know you have a very busy agenda tonight. And I have overall very good news. So I'm going to go through some of these fairly quickly. And then I'm going to focus the at the end a little more on the vaccine, which is probably what's what's on most people's minds. Next slide.

So I know this is small. What I wanted to illustrate here is just that Colorado has really dodged a tsunami, that others have not been so successful at what these four graphs show our three day incidence rates. For one for the state up in the left hand side, Boulder County is the second one on the right. Larimer County, down on the left, and then weld county on the right. And the the key takeaway here is, if you see it in red, it means we're headed in the wrong direction. And this is three day incidents. So it's more responsive, we can tell what's happening a little sooner. And all of us are headed down into the right direction with that green trend. That is good news. And that is what you're gonna see in our data as we move forward here. Next slide. Thank you for making that bigger too. This just shows our status on the dial that I've talked to you all about. We are currently in orange, and we have three indicators that we track in Boulder County. All three of our indicators are below that severe risk red and are in orange or better. And the one that's closest is our two week cumulative incidence rate which is at 330 4.7. It is lower than the 350. So we're again headed in the right direction. When I presented last week on this data we were at we were over a little over 350 so again headed in the right direction on all of our indicators. Next slide.

This is the metro graph that I often show you while Boulder County is in the red on next to the bottom there we have consistently had good seven day moving average with exception of the outbreak associated with cu and then the outbreak that everybody was experiencing to at the end of November and early part of December. The tail that you see on the very end there is what we expected to see

I think Denver got a little more than they expected. But we expected to see a little bit of a bump based on mobility data around

around Christmas and New Year's. And that is what we saw in that little bump. And we are now headed back in the right direction, I just want to say thank you, to everybody who's listening in tonight. This is because because people are doing the right things. They're taking this seriously. And I know how much of a sacrifice it's been for all of us to have to go through this. So but we've done the right thing. And in Colorado, it's definitely paying off for us. Next slide, please.

This is our five day average, where it's 71. cases as a five day average, this is back into the to the range where we can now do contact tracing and case investigations. We hope that this trend will continue down and expect with the distribution of vaccine that these numbers and it's going to get warmer in the next couple months plus vaccine will get out that this should be on a declining trend and we hope it stays that way. Next slide please.

This is the Boulder County residents who have tested positive or considered probable it's the cumulative rate per 100,000 since the beginning of November, so you can see where each of the individual municipalities are and where unincorporated Boulder County is. This trend is pretty been pretty consistent with the exception of the outbreak that occurred when the students came back in August, at which point boulder was significantly higher than the rest of the municipalities. Next slide.

This is our positivity rate. It's below 5%, which is where we want it that means we are doing enough testing in the community to identify infection. Um, it's been that way around since about the 19th. We've are a little bit earlier than that. We've maintained less than 5%, which is ideal, we have a ton of testing capacity in Boulder County thanks to Longmont for your partnership. In the Longmont site, we do have the ability to test more people, that is not a problem. If anybody is interested in where to find testing. If you just search Boulder County Public Health COVID-19 data, click on testing, you can see the locations of the testing sites, the Hours of operation we're testing is free. And you do not have to have symptoms. To access testing, you're going to see at the very last slide that I present that roughly 50% of the people that are positive don't even know that they have the disease. And that's why we're encouraging people to continue to take advantage of the free testing that's in Boulder County.

Next slide please.

This is our hospitalizations. Again, downward trending. That's that spike that's, that's at the end of it. 14, typically to 16 days after cases, we will see a little bit of a spike. So I think that's probably the beginning of the spike associated with Christmas there and a little bit of New Year's, we do expect that that will go back down again based on where our cases are now. Next slide.

This is the state hospitalizations, same trend. Next slide.

This is our deaths. Unfortunately, we did see some high deaths, a lot of those came from long term care facilities. And I really want to emphasize here because our long term care facilities have, they've been phenomenal partners with us. They have done all the right things. The challenges have been that there's 50%, again, of the people that have this disease don't know it. So as staff come into the facility that aren't even necessarily aware that they have the disease. Once it's in the facility, we all know it's very difficult to control the spread. And many of these facilities can't test on a daily basis. So that is where we saw most of the transmission during this. But we are seeing quote, We are closing out some of our long term care facility outbreaks, those will continue to go down as well. And the long term care facilities were the first group that was targeted to be reached by vaccine as well. And we are almost through all of those at this point. Next slide.

This is just a an emphasis on mass can make a significant difference. That purple line that you see they're both on the left graph, and on the right graph is 95% mass use in the state. We're at about 75% right now. And the blue line is the only other one I really wanted to compare to. Yep, thank you on both of those, and that is getting vaccine out rapidly to our highest risk populations. So you can see that until vaccine reaches a larger portion of our populations mass can make a significant difference and reducing the spread of this disease. We know again from a death perspective, but also from an economic perspective. Our businesses being able to operate people's quality of life. They're social animals.

National Health, when they don't have to isolate are all things that we all want to work towards and masking between now and that time that vaccine is out there, can can continue to make a significant difference. Next slide.

I think we're into vaccines. Yep. So we just put this guest opinion out today. I know this has been extremely frustrating the communication has to our community. And I completely understand it, we have been challenged with trying to make sure that there's been good coordination between the state and what they're learning in the local public health agencies and all the providers in our communities. And we are continuing to work on that some of the things that are happening are happening because there is not enough coordination across the entire state yet for us to be able to be effective at communicating, we are building that. And each week we meet with all of our providers here in Boulder County, the state is also meeting with all of the hospitals across the state. And we will continue to get better at making sure we're getting communication out in a way that makes it easier for our public to access this this vaccine. I'm going to go through where we are with a vaccine, what some of the challenges are. But we absolutely certainly understand that communication has been one of those challenges. And the last thing we want to do is to make it harder for people to get it and we know that that's happening right now. Next slide.

So on the left hand side here is really where I want to focus. This is the phased approach that the governor's office and cdphp has Carter Department of Public Health environment has put out, the first thing I want to say is that we are as a provider, we have

I think it's 30 providers in Boulder County that are registered as providers, any provider in the state has to follow this, or they risk losing their ability to provide the vaccine. So we are mandated to follow whatever comes out from cdphp in the governor's office, at the bottom of that yellow box where it says people aged 70 and older. So from that bullet above, is the phase that we are currently in right now. In Phase One, a 78% of the deaths that are occurring in our state or hot are happening between phase one a and phase one, B. And that's why you can't see the dotted line. But it's where that bottom of that yellow box is. So when you hear people refer to one B above the dotted line, that dotted line is right there. And we have to focus on that we are doing pretty well at a statewide level, there is still projection that we will meet this need across the state by the early part of March, it does look like that will happen based on the latest information that we have. And we know that this has been challenging because there was a lot of miscommunication early on. So this is where at first when this vaccine was coming out, we heard teachers are all included in this first phase, and then it changed. And teachers are included in the lower portion of one B, that was a challenging situation. And the miscommunication was difficult for so many of us to manage across every county. But we have it has been made really clear that we have to focus on one a and one B above that line. Again, we we have a plan in place, our issue is not capacity. As you'll see it is the ability to get enough vaccine, which I'll cover in a slide moving forward here. So next slide.

This just illustrates where we are, which is this projected short period of time when doses are limited. I'm going to illustrate it a little more in the next slide. But what I want to point out here is that we are going to get through this phase. It is going to you know if we have other vaccines Come on like the the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, which is a one dose, and it's easier to manage that can make a huge difference in terms of the amount of vaccine that we can get out that is under emergency use authorization review. So we won't hear about that vaccine for another week or two. But we will likely see more vaccines come online. That will help us expand into that larger number of doses available. As we start to hit phase two. What I want folks to know is that we are prepared so we have the ability to provide 20,000 doses a week in our community right now. So with our providers, and the folks that we have coordinated, we can do 20,000 doses a week, we are only getting about 3000 to 3500 doses a week. So we're well below our ability and capacity to provide vaccine and it is because

We are constrained on supply at this point. And the next slide I believe has the numbers relative for that. So on the the lower right hand side, you can see that total phase one B is about 1.3 million people. Total phase one a is about 187,000 people. On the right hand side, we've received this is a little bit dated, this was last week or week and a half ago, we'd received roughly 280,200 doses. So the state is projecting. They they were projecting 60,000 doses per week, some weeks, they were getting 35,000 doses. Some weeks, they were getting 60, some weeks, they were getting a little more than 60. In we are not hearing at a statewide level, until a few days before what we're actually going to get from the federal government. So it's been really challenging from the federal government to the state to get good information on how many doses of vaccine we can get and then count on. And then that same challenge occurs from the state to the local. So the way that vaccines were distributed early on, has changed. Now they're distributed a little bit differently. The vaccines go to as just one example, the hospital systems wants or some of the hospital systems want their vaccines distributed to their central office. And then they want to distribute between their hospitals based on the needs that they that they see. So the vaccine distribution is going to multiple different providers. And the only way for us to coordinate that is for us to sit down together. So we meet with all of our providers on a weekly basis, we talk about who has what vaccine, where we are in phase one a where we are in phase one B, how many are left, how we're going to work together to try to cover those population. So I just wanted you to have a sense of again, what I acknowledge has been a huge issue with being able to effectively communicate really clearly to our public, which makes it really hard for them. Next slide.

This is just the overall picture that's a little more updated on the total people that have been immunized with one dose, the total amount of providers, the people that have had two doses, and the cumulative total doses that have been administered. Next slide. And this is on the State's website if people wanted to track this. So we've done about 17, close to 17. I think this was as of this morning, so close to 17,001st doses, and about another 20 502nd doses. For folks at this point, we will assure because I know there was confusion, based on the announcement, again, from the governor's office yesterday, around second doses, I want to touch on that briefly here. Because I don't want people to think they're not going to get their second dose they are there because of the amount of supply we received over the holiday. And the slower pickup on administration of implementation of vaccines, there was about 40,000 additional vaccines at the statewide level that were not allocated. So they were not already

identified to go to a person who needed a second dose. And they wanted to make sure that they were getting those out. And that the supply which is going to bump up to around 125,000 doses per week for at least a couple weeks, would be able to take care of any second doses so that the the objective was to get more doses out, not have them sitting in waiting. And then with the increased supply, which the state is expecting to get that they would cover any second doses that were necessary, which it just resulted in more vaccines getting out, that essentially really doesn't change any of the phasing that's out there. So it's not those additional doses that got out are not going to change significantly. Any of the timing of those phases, it's just a little bit more vaccine is getting out into the community. Next slide, please.

This is the total number of vaccines per week that are administered in Boulder County from the beginning. Again, it is not a capacity issue for us we have the ability, not just Boulder County Public Health, but between all of our providers in the county, we have the ability to do 20,000 per week. Next slide.

There's 31, an enrolled provider Sorry, I think I said 30. Before, this is in general how the allocation has gone out up to this point, about 50% of hospitals 20 to federally qualified health centers, 22 pharmacies and then 10% to local public health agencies. And again, all providers have to follow the state phasing. And again, because there is not a central registry

For vaccine allocation, we have to work with all of our enrolled providers to coordinate across the county. Next slide.

We're getting there.

Just again, this is sort of reinforcing the same things we are planning actively, for not just lower one B phases, but lower one B has a lot of people and I don't know the exact numbers, I would need my vaccine coordinator to be here talking to you to be able to give you those numbers, but it has a lot of folks in it. But it is not it is we can manage, again, 20,000 per week. So we have the ability to get fully to phase one B, we are starting now to plan with the state on large scale points of dispensing. So once we get into the general population, in a couple months here, probably a little more than a couple months, because we are expected to finish one a and one B, by the end of February. One B will take a while. So we're probably into the summertime before we're into the general population. But we are planning for the large scale points of dispensing. We have identified multiple pop up sites, we have identified strike teams that can help us support getting to high impact populations that we know are being more impacted by this disease. So all of that planning is starting to occur. Now, we will have all those plans written and documented. And of course, when they're written and documented, if something changes, we have to go back and make adjustments. So again, part of the challenges just just for folks to know is when 70 plus were added to one B that was an additional 30,000 people in Boulder County alone. So we had to go back because there was 30,000 new people, we had to figure out how are we going to get more providers to be able to deal with those additional 30,000 people. So if there's massive changes that occur as we're going through this phasing that comes from the state, we do have to make adjustments. And and make sure that we are addressing those adjustments effectively. Next, next slide.

You can still sign up to be notified. Just if you sign up and you're not notified. It's only because we either don't have the vaccine available or you're not in the priority population. yet. As soon as we have vaccine. We are we are working through each of those priority populations. We know how many people are in those priority populations, we know how many people we've reached, we know how many people are left. So if you haven't received a notification, it's because you haven't hit that point in the queue to be able to be contacted to get a vaccine yet. Next, I think the next slide is the last slide.

Yep. So this was cases are increasing. But I didn't update this I apologize. cases are actually decreasing. Now, we do know what our New Year's impact looks like. Our modal mobility data, even though it showed an increased movement during the holidays, again, that very first slide that I showed, or second slide that I showed that had that headline, Colorado has done really well comparative to many states in the nation. And it's because people took this seriously they acted, I really again want to emphasize the importance of that, especially as we move forward until the vaccine is out in the community or more widely distributed process. There's still an estimated 102 people infectious. This was as of last week, my guess is this would be a little bit higher. So it'll probably be around one in, I don't know 150 or 120 people this week is my guess. But as their numbers decrease, you'll see those numbers increase. And just as a benchmark three, four months ago, and when we were in the wall that was around one in 800 or 900 people so a lot less a lot less infectiousness in the community months ago compared to where we are now we're heading in the right direction. So don't want people to let down their guard but but the the numbers should get better. And then again, 50% of the people don't have symptoms that have the disease and can spread it. So you've heard me talk a lot about all those those strategies that are on there. The one thing you can all do, if you haven't done already is go to add your phone.com it's an app that's on your phone, it will tell you if you've been in close proximity to somebody who's unknown positive and it will give you instructions on what to do from that point. So that's it. I know that's a lot of information. Apologize for probably going over on time there but wanted to make sure I got all that vaccine info out.

Can't see

Harold, was that you

appear at the top? No, I know. But did you? Did you move your hand? No. Okay, nevermind. All right. Anybody else? Jeff, thank you very much. Anything else other than here real quick. I wanted to show you all the wastewater.

Dale's gonna go over that. And it's three slides. He share my screen.

Do you see it?

Yeah, yes. Can you hear me,

mayor and city council. So just real quick, just take a couple minutes, we got a couple of slides here just to keep you updated on the data that we are receiving through the wastewater surveillance program. And so you can see here on this slide that as we are progressing into January, we are coming down from a bit of a spike, I think similar to what Jeff was talking about following Christmas and New Years. This past week, we have continued that downward trend. And you can also see on this slide, we're showing those different milestone dates of New Year's and Christmas and so on. You can also tell that on this slide that we're indicating that we're currently in orange. Then of course, compare that to previous times when the county was in orange, along with the city. Next slide, Harold.

So this slide is sort of the raw data with seven day lag. As we told you in the past, we believe that the the wastewater data for Longmont gives us a fairly good correlation for what we should anticipate for the daily

five day average of new cases in our community. Once again, you can see it is continuing that downward trend, which is a positive sign for us.

And then this last slide is the same data with the

the loading data indicating the five day average of loading data along with the five day average of cases. So it just smooths out the the sampling data. One other thing I did want to let the council know is we have now sampled twice for the variant of the

Coronavirus that that is reported to have originated in the United Kingdom. We've taken two samples, and it has not shown up in our community.

So at this time, we are not seeing any evidence of the UK variant of the virus in Longmont. And we will continue to test that weekly as well. I'm advised by staff that this testing is quite, quite accurate. And that if we do see the bare end, we intend to express it as a percentage of the overall caseload or viral load if you will, in the community. So that that's my quick report for the night.

All right, Harold. Yep. Thanks, Dale. Anything else from you know, just wanted to present that one to Jeff to see if we're we're seeing those correlations get pretty tight as the further we get into this. Any questions we'd be happy to answer. It doesn't look like we do. So let's move on. And do we have a motion to suspend the council council Rules of Procedure 25 B in order to approve the statement denouncing the attack in the United States Capitol on January 6. So move.

I'll tell you all second, I'll take that as a motion from Councillor Martin a second from Councilmember Christiansen. All in favor of suspending the council Rules of Procedure say aye. Aye.

Opposed say nay. All right, Motion carries unanimously.

All right. Do we have a motion to

pass the resolution denouncing the attack of the United States Capitol. I'll move approval. Second, okay. Okay. All right. I'm gonna go ahead and take Councilmember waters motion since he was the one who drafted the resolution. And it was seconded by Councilmember Peck as well as mayor Pro Tem Rodriguez. I know that's outside the rules of procedure but you both can do it because this was important one. All right. All in favor say aye.

Aye. Opposed say nay.

All right, the Motion carries unanimously customer pack their bags badly if you wouldn't mind. May I take advantage of the suspended rules and procedures for for an S Go ahead. And I believe Councilmember pecks can ask do we put a

topic of discussion for next week of the ice rink.

Well, that fit on the schedule, Harold.

Yeah, we could probably get that on. Okay. So can we put it on with mayor's prerogative?

Thank you. No problem. All right. And specifically, Joan, we just want to talk about the emails that people are saying requesting that we keep it open, correct. Yes. And and the possibility of how we're going to fund it. Okay. I just wanted to make sure that your requests got.

Got on. I'll talk to you. I'll talk to you tomorrow. All right, cool. All right, let's go ahead and move on to our favorite time of the year open forum. So we're gonna go ahead and take a five minute break. If you are listening, now's the time to get in line. So call and get in line, and we'll let you get in as long as that's up. All right, back in a few guys.

Okay, folks, for those of you watching our live stream, now would be the time to call in.

Our toll free number is 1-888-788-0099. Again, that number is 1-888-788-0099. When prompted, you're going to need the meeting ID you're going to enter 84144690049.

Again, the meeting ID is 84144690049. For the participant ID press pound.

Once you are connected, you will arrive into our waiting room. We will then admit you into the meeting,

you will need to mute the live stream so that we're not getting an echo when you unmute yourself, we will call upon you by the last three digits of your phone number.

Please do not hang up you will lose your line your your place in in this line and you may not get back in because we will lock the meeting at a certain point. Once you're done speaking, feel free to hang up.

So again, we will let you into the meeting here shortly.

please mute the live stream and listen to instructions over your over your phone. Thank you

Hi folks, as a reminder again, please make sure that you mute the live stream and listen to instructions through your phone. We will begin shortly.

Do not hang up until you've been called upon and had your time to speak with counsel. Otherwise, you may not be able to get back in because we will lock this

meeting.

Mayor. I'm going to drop the screen as it's been five minutes. And we'll give our live stream just a few seconds to get caught up with us.

And we'll be ready to go when you are.

All right, you're back.

I believe we are cool.

Let's go ahead and kick it off. I'll get my timer ready.

And Mayor Did you just want to go through the instructions for calling in again?

Yeah, so what you want to do is dial though if you're listening by all triple 8788099 and then you're going to go ahead and enter the meeting iD iD that shows up on your screen. And then when you're asked for your participant ID press the number sign there the pound sign, hashtag sign.

Once you join the meeting colors will hear confirmation they have entered the meeting. And you'll be told how many others are already participating in the meeting including color staff and council and then you'll be placed in a virtual waiting room until you're admitted to the meeting.

We ask you to mute the live stream, and listen for instructions on the phone. So there's no background noise. Once you're admitted to the meeting with us from the virtual waiting room, callers will be called upon by the last three digits of their phone number and then allowed to unmute to provide their comments one at a time. Comments are limited to five minutes per person, and each speaker will be asked to state their name and address for the record prior to proceeding with their comments. Of course, counsel may ask questions or want, they might want one or more of us might want to engage a certain speaker, which is allowed at the open forum. Unlike typical first and last calls, calls of public invited to be heard. Once you were done, the speakers will be moved back to the waiting room, and you should just simply hang up. So that's what I should do every week. But it's long and kind of works. But let's go ahead and open it up the forum, how many are in the forum? How many are in the queue? First of all, the last week counted, I believe, is 23.

I have not locked the meeting. It's not quite 1010 minutes yet, it will be very shortly. So I will allow anyone else who's dialing furiously to get in here within the next minute. But I will unlock

this. Sorry, I will unmute this first caller.

The first caller your phone number ends in 199199. I'm going to ask you to unmute.

Are you there? caller 199.

So a quick quick question as we're waiting. I also understand that there's going to be a couple groups of people like I got an email we got we received an email from the Longmont area democrats and they wanted to read a statement. And there were several people who were together. I don't know if that's possible. I guess you'd need to be in the same room. Mayor, sometimes we've done that in the past, but I've been notified of that list prior. I have not been notified of any such list for tonight. So if they made it into the call,

they will go in the order that I see here listed. All right.

So I'm asking caller 199 to unmute 199. Are you there?

Hit star six on your phone that will unmute you.

I'll give you just another couple of seconds and then I'll come back to you.

All right. I'll go on to the next caller. Caller 271. I'm going to ask you to unmute 271271.

Let's try the third one. And then if there's still a problem, I'm gonna propose the three is three typically signifies a problem.

Right? Let's try the third color. 278278. I'm going to ask you to unmute.

There you are. Hi there. Can you hear me? We sure can. Welcome. Okay. Would you please state your name and address for the record and you have five minutes?

Brian Goodwin 2128 23rd Avenue.

Thank you, you may begin. Okay, thanks. So I just want to bring up a couple topics. And, you know, one may be relevant one, maybe not. The first one I want to start with is rank choice voting. And the need for long mode to do this on a municipal level. I have pushed for many years at a state level for us to be like Maine, and first rank choice voting statewide.

As well as a federal level, but for the time being Colorado law only allows me miscible level. If anyone needs I can explain rank choice voting, but hopefully that already is understood. And you know, the main thing is that it allows people to vote they're conscious. And we shouldn't presume even though by and large, when we have two parties that

you know here in Longmont, I'm sure there's third parties, there's fourth party for parties,

and people can just vote their conscience and what I'm asking for you to do at the municipal level here at Longmont is to lead the way in the way honestly the state has not because rank choice voting is such a no brainer that I just can't possibly think of a reason why we would not have it at a municipal level. And it's just about equity and fairness. So that two parties don't dominate all

The other thing I want to discuss is ransomware. And this is one where I'm not sure if it's really for you or at a different level. But obviously, we've all seen hospitals and municipalities that have undergone ransomware attacks where they've had to basically pay out through Bitcoin or other various methods. And that's the last thing we want. And what I want is for a long month to be proactive instead of reactive, I don't want us to wait until hospital where the city itself has been hacked. And for all intents purposes, shut down. I don't want to have to pay a ransom, which obviously reinforces the criminal state and their business model.

There are many tools we can use many kinds of strains of ransomware have in fact been reverse engineered by software engineers, security firms that provide decryption tools many for free, there is something called no more ransom. It's literally a project, no more ransom project. And they offer tools for free that can help protect municipal level hospitals, everything you could think of another one is ID ransomware. And I just really like said, I don't know if this is appropriately directed towards counsel wish to go elsewhere. But I really want long to do what I can to protect itself and get ahead of this issue. Thank you so much.

I was expecting an opportunity to respond. I guess we have it.

All right, we'll move on to the next caller.

And it looks like a couple other callers have

have left on their own. So I won't be able to call them out. I will go on to 347.

Yeah, 347. I'm going to ask you to unmute now.

Are you there? 347.

I am getting some tax from people in the community saying that they did call in the first couple times I called in and they were not on mute, but we still could not hear them.

So I would encourage those people that continue to hear me now.

One moment color. So, Mayor, what would you like me to do? I'm not sure I understand it, just let me know. Just make sure they stay in the queue. And then after this caller, let's go back to that first one first. And the second one, I'm not able to those callers have left the meeting. All right. Well, those callers can hear callback in place.

I know.

Hello, hello. One moment, please. So as a reminder for folks, we have unlocked the meeting. So we had a couple of initial callers

leave the meeting, the mayor's asked if you are still watching our live stream to please call back in.

All right, caller 347. You may begin by stating your name and address. Thank you.

Hi,

my name is Ben surgeon. I'm at 744 Atlas Street. And thank you, mayor and council. It's great to be able to talk I am

calling again this week about the Smart Meter issue. And I just wanted to reiterate points that have already made and maybe provide a little bit more background.

And the age there's a number of issues with smart meters. And so I don't want to just limit it to one of the topics here. But

basically,

smart meters are not necessary to put on on every house. That's the main, the main issue is that with just over 400 units, we could achieve all of the goals, the stated goals of the project. And so the

you know, investing in smart meters for all residences and all apartments is unnecessary use of taxpayer funds.

If there's other issues that are or benefits to the city through sale of data or some other

thing that we don't know about,

then you know that those needs to be shared with with the community. But from what we know the the stated goals have to do with energy regulation, energy monitoring and energy performance throughout the town. And

as I said 400 units would be sufficient. So the the there's three areas of danger or risk with smart meters one is fires

I wouldn't want one of these on my house, it's not properly grounded.

And secondly, the

data security, we don't really know how that data is going to be used, and assurances from,

you know, government

you know, workers who may

be completely honest and and think that it's, it's fine don't necessarily know what's actually going to happen with the data that goes out of the house.

And third issue is

the green issue. Supposedly, it's being done because of, you know, for ecology reasons. But in fact, data is of massive energy hog. And all of that data needs to be stored somewhere on a machine live using electricity 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. And so, you know, producing and storing all of that data is not green.

And

the, the final issue is that, you know,

the non ionizing radiation, which the industry claims is not harmful to humans. In fact, there's 1000s, or hundreds of research reports that show that it does cause issues, not only for humans, but for all animals, bees, insects, etc. So

the safety

measures that are used to monitor these kinds of things are woefully out of date.

And the industry and the government, or the US government are not

updating those regulations to current science.

So that's basically what I had to say, tonight. Thank you. Again, I encourage you to really think about this issue and not spend taxpayer money on something that is not going to achieve the goal

and creates all of these other risks from data to health to

increasing energy, not not reducing it. Thanks.

Color, would you stand the line that appears? counsel has a question. Okay.

Thank you, Mayor Begley.

Caller,

what is your basis for saying that 400 meters would be sufficient? Are you aware of the topology of our distribution grid?

That is a number that was provided by a

I believe, Professor Shaklee.

I could be wrong on who I'm quoting on that. I did not make up that number. That was a number that was

generated by a

somebody who's knowledgeable in the field. Well, I could I could send you an email later if I can track down the source of that. Well, I've had conversations with Professor Shockley. And he is not aware of the topology of lossless distribution grid. So I'm not sure he could arrive at a number that way.

It's pretty hard. Yeah.

So and, but, but I guess, I think the principle stands that it's not necessary to put a meter on every house to understand the energy demands that are happening minute by minute throughout the city. No, it's whether it's great, or whether it's 400, or 1400. It's certainly not necessary to put one on every house. No, it's necessary to provide some benefits to the householder to have a smart meter. But if they're not interested in that, I agree that that householder doesn't have to have a smart meter.

The other question that I have is, is

can you explain the physics of non ionizing radiation causing cellular damage? I can explain the physics of ionizing Red Red radiation causing cellular damage so

could you but I can't do yeah, I'm I seen some reports on it. I not I don't think I can do justice to it, but I would be happy to send you some research on that. I would appreciate it very much Marsha Martin at Longmont. colorado.gov.

Excellent. Yep. I will do that as a point of privilege from the chair, because we're working. I appreciate you not explaining that this evening. Thank you.

Yeah.

Given that I'm

good, like, a long day already, yeah, customer back.

Thank you, Mayor badly. I'm actually Councilwoman Martin asked the same question I was going to about the 400 meters. So thank you, Ben, for calling in. All right. Thank you, sir. Okay, have a good evening. All right, next caller.

So one of the callers did call back in. So I'm going to go back to 271. I'm going to ask you to unmute. And as a reminder, folks, the stream is going to be delayed 20 to 30 seconds or more depending on your device and how you're connected. So please make sure that you listen to instructions through your telephone. There you are 271 You may begin.

Hi, there, council members. My name is Diana chamas.

I live at 1850. Princess drive. I am a Longmont resident

I have a few a few concerns. The first is

you know, I've lived in Longmont for a very long time. And as I've

driven through downtown Longmont recently,

the decimation and I

have businesses and how downtown is so, so decimal, it really is very disheartening and discouraging to me.

And I'm really concerned about what that

the council has in mind to

once again rebuild Longmont after the devastation of COVID-19.

You know, the Longmont downtown authority was a huge emphasis for many years, and it really became a vibrant downtown area. And unfortunately, that's not the case anymore.

You know, I recently heard that the unemployment rate in Colorado is at approximately 30%. And

my offering would be that as a city, I think that we need to really figure out how to move beyond the fear and

take a hold of our community and help help our population thrive again.

And I would suggest that perhaps each of you could look at what the community of monument really recently did, to reopen their community and encourage their businesses to reopen.

Given that we are talking talking about a virus with better than a 99% survival rate,

the decimation and destruction in our community is

way beyond measure, for a virus of that man have such a miniscule.

I don't know what word to use, but

it's just very concerning to me.

The other thing that I would like to comment about is also, as been suggested, is

the smart meters. And

you know, technology is really great until it's not. And technology really seems to be overtaking our lives in

many ways. And

in some ways, it's good.

I think that in other ways it is more destructive and beneficial. And

as the 5g gets rolled out and all these various things, I think that we need to really step back and take a closer look at what the effects are on our

health and population. And

you know, this has been an ongoing issue I've

unfortunately, I'm not good at quoting, stats and all of that. But as we continue to roll out all of this

technology, social media and

Various other things, we already know that it has a detrimental effect on our health and well being. And given all that our community has gone through in the past year,

I don't think that now is the time to roll out something that is going to cost 1000s and 1000s of dollars, and

also bring a increase to utility bills. at a time. As I said previously, when unemployment is very high,

people are struggling individually, families are struggling students are struggling. I think that at this time, there is a much better way to be investing tax dollars in our community. And I thank you for your time and attention. That was exactly five minutes. Thank you. Councilmember Christiansen.

Um, just as a point of information, I just looked up on the Colorado labor, Department of Labor and Employment, and it says that the current rate of unemployment in Colorado is 6.4%. That's according to the Department of Labor.

Just a point of information, but I I do appreciate what she said. We know that there are

we have a big problem with unemployment and jobs, but it isn't quite as bad as it as it isn't 30%.

All right, next caller.

All right, the next caller, your phone number ends in 400400. I'm going to ask you to unmute.

Try that again.

There you are.

Hello.

Hello. Can you hear me? We sure can you may begin.

Yes. This is Marisa Dirks.

Hello, mayor and council. Can you state your write your address? Yes.

Yes, I live at 12874 North 95th Street.

And I said I'm Marisa Dirks and I, I do the media and communications for long with Eric Democrats. And I'm the person calling in to read our statement. In support of our electives and in support of democracy. I'm going to go ahead and read it won't take long

to all Colorado federal, state, county and city elected officials and public servants. These are very difficult and hazardous times for our democracy. We the undersigned individuals and organizations support you and your ongoing public service on behalf of our communities, our state, the United States of America and all who call America home. We the undersigned stand with you in your dedication to the American values and principles of democracy and rule of law as enshrined in our US Constitution. We support equitable treatment and opportunities for all people living in our country. No exceptions. On January 6, we saw violence at our US Capitol, a repudiation of our priceless freedoms and the integrity of our elections, freedoms that are embodied within and depend upon democracy and rule of law. We are also seeing a false comparison of the actions on January 6, with a primarily peaceful civil rights protests across our nation last spring and summer. But violence and destruction will never represent the values of people who aspire to live in peace.

We acknowledge with gratitude, your steadfast efforts on behalf of all of your constituents and all residents of the United States. We honor your devotion to the good of the entire community. We also expect that you will work with each other in a spirit of partnership to foster the best outcomes. We encourage you to continue your valuable and deeply appreciated service on our behalf. Also that in Lincoln Lincoln's immortal words, government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth with our thanks and respect signed, long line area Democrats. And just to let everybody know we're going to we've posted the statement on our website at Longmont dems. org. Anybody can sign on to the statement, and we will be posting shortly all of the people who have signed on and I just really appreciate having the opportunity to read it here tonight. Thanks so much.

Thank you, Miss Dirks on behalf of all of council town SmartPak

Actually, you just said what I was going to say America. badly. Thank you, Marissa. And that goes very perfectly with our resolution that we just just passed. So thank you again, I just want to chime in. That's why I've been doing this. I'm coming up on 10 years now, on this council in 111, way or another, I've served for almost a decade. And I have we have gone the rounds among ourselves and previous council members over politics and posturing and personal tips. This last year, just when you I mean, before, I just I don't I don't know if anybody else feels this way. But this this last year with the political climate and COVID it's almost like, nobody could go see a movie. We couldn't go out to eat. So let's just watch a reality TV show called presidents and the campaign. And it just paid her down to all levels, social media, real life, and it has just been exhausting. And yeah, so I appreciate that statement, because it has felt

far heavier than other years. So So thank you, Miss jerks. All right. Yeah. Well, we really, we really do appreciate you guys. So thank you. Thank you very, very kind of you say that. All right. Next caller.

Yes, the next caller, your phone number ends in 414. I'm gonna ask you to unmute 414

Hi, this is Sarah Larry 534 Emery Street. I just want to thank you for providing an open forum for the citizens of Longmont. I know it's going to be a long evening for you and I appreciate you providing this opportunity. First, I want to raise your awareness about the closing of additional streets that will greatly impact the east west corridors for Kensington Park and the historic East Side residential neighborhoods. Both of these neighborhoods share ninth Avenue is their northern boundary. And then they either have third or fourth Avenue as a southern boundary for their neighborhoods. Within these two neighborhoods, residents have Eighth Avenue, Long's peak Sixth Avenue, Fifth Avenue, and Fourth Avenue is their residential corridor to access streets. Nine to the Third Avenue are four lane arterial streets, so parents and students in this school attendance area. In these two neighborhoods would include Columbine and Rocky Mountain elementary school, Timberline and St. John's k eight schools, trail Ridge middle school and skyline High School. It's also their access to our City Library. When looking at neighborhood access, you'll see that Eighth Avenue is closed its east west corridor is closed due to the railroad. In the 80s the city's closed off the street and deal with the rail world in order to create an access in the northern section of the city for development.

Long's peak East West corridor is completely open and also provides unobstructed local access. Sixth Avenue does not have complete eats with access to the Sixth Avenue Plaza. Fifth Avenue presently has complete East West access and Fourth Avenue has sporadic access depending on downtown concerts or activities.

It is a city priority as well as a citizens priority to have assessable corridors and access for bikes cars and pedestrians according to our vision long month plan and this would allow for safe movement of all people. The concern I want you to think about is another proposal for another East West corridor being closed off to these Eastern neighborhoods due to a potential deal with the railroad in the city's Boston street plan or project. The city's proposing closing off Fifth Avenue in order to attain this, the resulting effect on Kensington Park and the historic Eastside neighborhood would be out of there. Five local streets, East West corridors, only two would remain completely open. Eighth and Fifth Avenue would be closed because of the railroad Sixth Avenue would be closed according to

because of the plaza and then Fourth Avenue we could lose access if something's going on downtown. Additional compounding factors now would be the addition of multifamily residential structures being added on Third Avenue

South so long man has the completion

The South Main Station, which presently has one of the five buildings fill, this is going to greatly impact corridor access on Third Avenue. And we can only anticipate further development along Third Avenue, which is a high priority and invasion Longmont plan. And this is a part of the downtown redevelopment area zoned mix you.

Right now there's a 68, affordable housing unit plan for third and Atwood. And I'm certain this is you know, one of several to come. So this increase in density housing only makes the need for enable neighborhood local corridor, access, and necessity. Finally, let's just talk about the elephant in the room. The train. This is a constant disruption for Kensington Park, and historic East Side neighborhoods, when they're traveling east or west. It's not only the train traffic and the length of the train that impacts neighbors on a regular basis. But there's another thing that you might not be aware of. And that's called train idling. This is where the train just stops, and blocks between Fourth Avenue and ninth Avenue. Not sure why they idle, they're not hooking up with other cars. I think they're taking a break. And so we can call in. And they don't move the train, but they just make a record. But it I mean, this happens daily. So the train just sits there idle blocks access. My greatest concern when closing off East West access to neighborhoods is the timeliness of emergency vehicle. Getting to home safety, the students and families who are attending their local school, or the library, or just even trying to go visit a friend go to the store or go to events is hilarious. We have a lot of resilience.

We hit five minutes, 15 seconds. I'm gonna have to stop asking Please don't. My thing is please don't close off any more streets within this area. Thank you. All right. Thank you.

Harold, you just heard it. Please take into account. All right. Next caller.

All right, our next caller, your phone number ends in 422422. I'm going to ask you to unmute. There you are.

Hello.

Hello. You may begin.

Good evening, council members. My name is Melissa Chopin. And I'm actually not a resident, but I do own a multifamily property located at 326. Baker Street. I'm calling could you still provide our your address for us? So we know where you're from? Oh, I actually live in in Lyons at 128 Subaru court and lions. Thank you. You bet. And the reason why I'm calling this evening and thank you so much for your time. I'm calling about the proposed affordable housing development there on Third Avenue and Atwood. First of all, I would like to thank Councilmember waters for his prompt reply to my email concerning this issue. Because I wasn't really quite sure what to do. I received notification, but then was informed that there would be no public meetings on concerning this. I did send emails to the planning department. But as this whole thing unfolds, I just have a few more questions for the council.

Concerning this project, this project, originally I thought it was going to be rental units, but I have discovered that it is going to be sold off 65 units is the current number that I received from the developer on 65 units in this area between the alley and Atwood and third and about halfway up the block to fourth.

I think it's I know affordable housing is a huge priority for the council and and i agree with that this is going to be housing for working families of Longmont and and I think that's a great thing. What my major concern though is, is parking. One of the problems is I guess the council had come up with something correct me if I'm wrong, that when affordable housing projects come up, they only have to have one parking place per unit as opposed to another type of development of two bedroom units would have two parking places.

I see this as a as a as an issue in the area directly affecting the black or my building is that currently in my building? I have two one bedroom units that have to have parking on the street on on that 300 block of Baker Street. My other two bedroom units have to

parking places on site for each unit.

And so what I'm concerned about is, there won't be any additional parking on Third Avenue. There's very limited parking on Atwood. And I guess since these are going to be sold off units, I would assume these working families are going to have to have some kind of transportation. And I just see a conflict in in parking in the area. So you know, my family's owned this building for 20 years in Longmont, and I've been working on it for 20 years, I do my own management. And there has been a lot of conflict with parking in that black for many years, there's been confrontations amongst the neighbors. And the way I see it, we're kind of the closest black to this project. And there's going to be a lot of overflow parking in our area.

As far as I know that there are studies of proposed developments that include traffic and fire and environment and drainage and all of that. And I guess I just questioned whether maybe, with some of these projects, perhaps a neighborhood impact study would be beneficial, or maybe council could look at some alternatives or maybe just increased parking. Because like I said, I would assume, and maybe I'm incorrect that that the majority of these working families are going to have to have vehicles for transportation.

Finally, I just wanted to let the council know I'm I'm a member of the crime free multi housing program with the City of London and I've been a member of that for 10 years. My building is certified on crime free housing, and I try to be a good neighbor. And I want to let council know how impressed I am with the crime free program. As I'm sure you're aware, we had an incident on New Year's Day in the 300 block of Baker Street. And I was very aware and able to communicate with my residents during the SWAT team lockdown. But

that's that's all I wanted to say. And I hope you can look into that more. Or maybe I should be approaching the planning department more with my ideas, but I I just wasn't sure. And this is the first time I've ever talked to the council. So I thank you for your time. Don't hang up. Okay. Councilmember, Councilmember Christiansen and then Councilmember Martin.

Thank you for Miss to miss Chauvin. Did I get that right? for calling? I think you bring up a lot of good points. And

maybe you could bite me separately, and we could talk about things. I I, I have been concerned for a while that we are

overly optimistic about how few vehicles there will be for

some of these units. It's an incentive we gave people,

developers for

developing these units. But I do worry about many of these developments, impacting the neighborhood with

having an impossible time, everybody having an impossible time trying to find a place to park and I think she's right to be concerned about her neighbors, I mean her

renters so I do. Thank you, and I thank you for participating in the drug free or crime free program. Thanks.

Everyone.

Yes, I would like to ask the caller or perhaps to inform the caller that that the is 65 unit development is planning to provide buyers with a credit toward an E bike as well as

annual

eco passes for for busing, and it is a goal in envision Longmont that Longmont become

a walkable city where one doesn't need a car. So I wanted to ask you how you would feel about

doing that for your tenants, maybe not the ebike because your margins aren't that big but

but maybe by the monico Pass.

Think about it.

Oh, well I appreciate that. I appreciate that comment. Now. When I when I kind of look at it, of course who I rent to, with the two bedrooms are small families with with children with small children. And I don't know about an E bike. Kind of working out with that when we have to go grocery shopping and tote our little one but as far as the

Mass Transportation. I mean, we're talking about little ones, like babies that have to be in, you know, baby carriers. And so, I don't know, I could, I could try to approach them with that. But I do see that as difficulty, um, you know, with, with families with small children, trying to use mass transportation, and D bikes. And and especially if you're buying a large amount of groceries, you know, you can only carry so much. But if you have a family of four, it would seem to me even getting on a bus would be difficult with that. So good luck, or have hands on have off street parking already. Yes, that's true. And and that's, that's why I'm thinking with this with this multifamily, perhaps over time, but I don't know how much time it will take for that, you know, this area, doesn't really have a grocery store. within walking distance. There's no drugstore within I think the nearest drugstore would be the Walgreens up at 10th in Maine, and the nearest grocery store is the Safeway on Ken Pratt, I believe.

And so, you know, those distances, kind of kind of contribute to the difficulty that I would see where people are going to have cars, you know, because you got to be able to move a lot more things than than just yourself, you know, as far as when you go shopping. But, but I understand that, that the developer, the developer has proposed that also. And but I guess I just think there's still going to be people that have to have the cars to get to work. And I would assume, like I said, this is going to be a good group of working class Longmont families. And and it's been my experience, at least in my rentals, that most everyone has a car.

All right, thank you, Doctor water. Sorry. Thanks very badly. Michelle, for thanks for your call.

It may be the council members can help me with this. If not, if either Kathy or Harold or you know, somebody else who's deeply knowledgeable, where we ended up with all of the the specifics of our inclusion, our inclusionary housing ordinance and the incentives etc.

Let me just say, I know, I know the developer in this case, and I've shared this with Michelle, and he's a he's a stand up guy. I think they do good work. However,

she I think he has real legitimate concerns about parking in this in this area. And it's my understanding that these are for sale property, this is a project, it would be for sale properties, that would take advantage of the mid tier exception. They're not affordable, they're attainable. Is that clear? Is that accurate?

So that's what I understood. I think there was some information that came across today, that it may be changing. So that's been sort of a moving target. I've been in meetings all day long for different doing this people's work, by the way, but but I've been in meetings all day long. So yes, that's what I

that's what I understood last week, I think. So for any project, any development

that has that is building mid tier housing, the incentive we created for them is that they don't have to pay a fee in lieu. Right. Right. But they don't get a they don't get a pass on the parking requirement.

Is that not also the case, right? The parking and the parking and the height variances come in based on the the affordable housing piece in in that section. So it really depends on on what they put into play, and what they bring forward in their submittal.

The middle tier, if you remember will vary. So 80 to 100 is zero, then you have 100 110 that has right? More discount that a different discount 10 220. So you've got to do all the math to then figure out what's the requirement, but those discounts, those discounts are on the payment in lieu. That was unrelated as I recall, correct. So I because I know there are other there are other residents in this part of town who are listening to this caught this conversation tonight. And and because I've read that I've read the comments they are there are other people concern

that that

this is not this is a word. This is an attainable housing project. Not a subsidized, affordable unit for sale. And the same kind of standards would apply for parking under those conditions that they do to any development. Correct.

Correct and under a tradition marking you it's a parking space and a half for one bedroom, two parking spaces for

To better, is that right? Correct. And under the traditional development process, they can ask for a variance. Yeah. But that's a different process. All right. Thank you.

Just as a point of information on the replacement proposal that neither of these two gentlemen have read yet incorporates 15% deed restricted, affordable units.

All right.

All right. Thank you color ending in 443443.

You may state your name and address for the record.

My name is Jim mantenerse. And I live at 2435 Lillie court unit 315, otherwise known as the village cooperative of Longmont.

It is a 52 unit senior living facility, I come to speak opposing the variance requested by the real estate equities for the vacant lot across the street from our cooperatives.

At this time, I know the members of the cooperative opposes on several issues, I will address only some of those issues, other members will address some of the other issues in the to save some time because we weren't able to get on in five minutes.

At this time, we have very little information about the proposed site other than it involves a change from an eight single detached home homes to eight paired homes or 16 separate unit. Real Estate equities did not inform us of this change. And we found out about this from a city bulletin, which was kind of bad, we actually have a pretty good relationship with them. But in fact, they are our management company and didn't tell us anything about this.

As I said other cooperative members will speak with us and other issues, I will speak to our concern about safety issues. The age of our members ranges from about 62 years of age to 93 years of age. This often means that we are in need of emergency vehicles to respond to our building in a more frequent basis than other high density apartments or buildings. One of our concerns is that adding 60 units might be many more vehicles in this area. If the plan parking for the new parent house is not adequate than the possibility exists of vehicles being parked in the street, possibly hindering fire trucks or ambulances from having easy access to our building. I am hopeful that the fire marshal and other city planners would make sure that our cooperative continues to have the excellent response we have from our responders and I want to give a shout out to our fire department. And the EMP they respond to our building. Our objections are based on what we don't know as well as what we know.

We have always been aware of that eight homes would be built on these labs and have no problem with that we bought our units knowing this, this request for change was never communicated to us. I hope that giving our thoughts on this issue allow us to have some input on this variance, we understand that our concerns have to go to the board that handle these things that we did did want the city council to be aware of our concerns. In the beginning of this process. We think we're good neighbors and we're good people in Co Op we will be good neighbors to the people who may do build over there, whatever it is they build. But we are concerned because of the the now we've just doubled up how much parking we're going to need and

as you can tell a lot of other issues and parking becomes a big deal. So but in this case, I we have cars parked on the street, it might be difficult for fire engines to get in there. And like I said it's it's kind of important to us in our in our building.

Thank you sir.

Customer Christiansen

Thank you, Mr. mesonephros. For calling and letting us be aware of this. Um, I'm wondering if it's possible for us to

a lot of places around nursing homes and various other places like that have a dedicated area that you can't park in similar to a you can't park in a bus zone. And you can't park in these emergency vehicle areas. couldn't really as a city do something like that. So be sure that there's always

a way to for emergency vehicles to have direct safe access to any resident in this Co Op.

Are you still here, sir?

Yes, yes. I was one of the things we had considered was if we could get some of that

a non parking zone

so that we could have everybody get in there easy. I mean, we've already had several times we've had to have emergency being

They're in right now. Because there's nothing across the street. It's very easy for them to get in there. So I do think that's a, that's a possibility. I mean, I would like you to consider

Did we lose him?

No, I'm still here. Okay.

Okay, I wasn't sure if you wanted more of an answer.

Just so council knows, I think this, this project, they've come in for a pre application process, but they actually haven't come in with an application. Obviously, these are all things that we have to look into once they come in with an application has to go through all the review for the various departments to ensure that health safety is all taken into account on this. And so

I think they're starting it, but we haven't seen a formal application.

That is correct. And we, we felt we just wanted to make sure that our, our voices were heard at an early part, because if it gets too deep into it, the changes would be financial. And we're just trying to work with them to see we get something going here to help us all out.

So,

Harold, that was your signal that there's a lot going to unfold here around this project. And it's in the very early stages. But I do want to just get it sounds to me like Mr. Mann's a nurse, you have other people in the queue?

Who want to speak to this. It's my understanding that

this this doubling of the number of housing units on that piece of property is tied into the sale of the property. Is that correct?

That was our understanding that, yeah, still, it made that may not be the case.

Our understanding, I spoke to someone from the city and they told us that there was we don't know who the buyer is, by the way, our real estate equities is not developing this property. They are selling the property someone else

for someone else had developed, I guess, I guess what's important for, especially given what Harold said that everyone understands, especially whoever's considering buying a piece of property, if if somebody is having a conversation about selling a piece of property, assuming that you can don't have units on it, that's a that's a pretty tenuous assumption, given the fact that that requires varies, the site plan was approved with eight units. This is the village Co Op in which people have been waiting for years to get into. And now surely after moving in, there's a fairly significant change occurring across the street. And I, you know, whoever's paying attention to this conversation that potential sale, should understand that this has a long way to go if it's going to be approved. Is that is that fair?

I, if I can jump in?

To answer some of those questions,

and finance phenomenal staff that I'm communicating with me.

Based on what they're seeing in the pre pre app, it will have to go to planning and zoning commission. Dawn's also indicating I think this is the neighborhood meeting notice they started the conversation that always starts a conversation. But this will also require a concept plan amendment, and it has to come to the city council as well. So there's a lot of moving pieces in this that.

I don't think we've even seen it in terms of a formal application so staff can comment, but many of these things will have to go to planning and zoning and city councilman. Thanks.

Yeah, there will be a meeting next week that we also will attend. But we wanted to make sure that the council was aware of our concerns.

All right, next caller.

All right. Call.

At a glance at least a dozen or more. Okay, great. Yep. So the next color is color 466 color 466 you can unmute yourself state your name and address for the record. Hello. Can you hear me? We can. All right. My ready to go. You are state your name and address for the record and you have five minutes. Okay. Judas Blackburn 3724 Oakwood drive in Longmont. Good evening console and Mayor Bagley. I'd like to thank you first of all for joining those other local officials in signing on to a letter to President Elect Biden drafted by Colorado mountain packed as reported yesterday and the times call. You and the other local officials requested a shared voice on federal policy related to climate and public lands.

This fits well with Council's ongoing commitment to 100% renewable energy, for Longmont by 2030. But as with that commitment, the devil is in the details.

If the Biden administration follows through on its pledge to make our climate crisis a priority, there will surely be a focus on air quality, and specifically on slowing fossil fuel emissions, not only to address global warming and changing weather patterns, but also for reasons of public health. We here in Longmont will have something to share about how to do that if we take advantage of the tools at our disposal.

One such tool is the new power accorded to local governments by the passage of SB 19 181, which allows local governments to adopt more strict oil and gas regulations than what the state requires.

Another tool is our access to sophisticated air monitoring conducted on the east and west sides of Longmont by Dr. Detlef helmig, which is readily accessible to the public.

That research as recorded on helmink website shows recent alarming spikes in the release of methane butane and benzene, which other speakers this evening may say more about in terms of health and climate consequences. My questions to you regarding Longmont air quality are the following. First, according to rule 903 in the CO GCC regulations, local governments and emergency responders are supposed to get prior knowledge of such flaring and venting at nearby wealth, which apparently did cause these recently spiking numbers. Or you should receive subsequent notice when such spikes are the result of emergencies rather than intentional planning. Has that been the case here recently? Were you or city staff alerted recently, when these upticks in dangerous air quality levels occurred? If so, what were the consequences?

And finally, we all realize that Dr. Helmets air quality research has been quite damning to the safety claims of oil and gas operators.

To the extent that helmig was summarily fired from cu, on trumped up charges that were at least partially related to his contract with Longmont for doing this monitored monitoring at all. And even through and especially because of this contract, and between helmig and Longmont. It did not go through, see you.

And because of that, I'm wondering, is there anything you can do as long as not to the console or have done to contradicts these aggregate accusations? against how many so called bookkeeping, or to publicly defend how Mike's reputation?

I'll be interested in your answer to these questions and I encourage you to stay vigilant and

may air pollution issue and climate crisis front. After all, when it comes to the air we breathe. We're most definitely all in this together.

Thank you. Oh, stay on the line for us. You just heard back. Okay.

Thank you for calling in Judith and for your comments. Um, yes, the city is aware of the spikes in the vo C's. I'm not sure at this point. We'll have to check with Jane to see if this was because of a leak or was it just pure venting?

And my question is going to be to our staff, either to Harold or Eugene. What can we as a city do about the spiking and letting agencies know about our air quality here? Is the city in a position to do anything about that? Or is because it is public knowledge? Can this information be used by outside organizations?

monitoring air quality

I'm gonna ask Ms. Dell to come in to help make sure I answer this correctly. Okay, Bill, are you there?

Yes. I want to say in one of my Jane, we forwarded this information to the CEO GC, correct? Yes, we've reported it to the regulatory agencies, which is really what the city can do when it comes to our attention. Okay. Have we received any response from them at all? on this? Unfortunately, council member pack? I don't believe so. I met with Jane today. She didn't, she didn't tell me that, that we've received any response.

When I was speaking with Jane today, I also suggested that we may want to put this type of information in a in the notification that would go out to concern people in the community that wants to know, as well as posting it on our website. So you know, what we're trying to do is be as transparent as we can when we see this kind of information.

And certainly get it to the officials that are really in the responsible role for for regulation. Okay.

My other question, this is just long along vision is that, because of the alerts because of the damage to health, I think it would be a good conversation at some point to have about having phone alerts to people that that this is happening, so that they can

so that they can be aware and take responsibility for their own health, and do whatever they need to do. So thank you, Harold thing I would add, just Mayor Bagley and Councilmember pack is that Jane will be giving you making your presentation and giving you an update on oil and gas issues.

I believe it's the February 9 may 9. So she's coming up to to talk with you about that as well. Okay. Okay. So, Judith, if you're still on the line, did you get that that we're going to have a presentation?

I wrote it in my date book already shall be back.

Thanks. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. Thank you all very much. One minute, man. If I can add some additional information. I know that they've added a news category on the news that we do for air quality. So they're starting to work on that and we'll have more information for Council. Perfect. Thank you. Good.

All right, next caller.

All right. Caller ending in 499 caller ending in 499.

Hello, hello, you may state your name and address for the record and you have five minutes. Okay, thank you. This is Joe Kelly of barberry drive in Longmont

smart meters. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2013. Children are disproportionately affected by environmental exposures, including cellphone radiation. You have heard my voice you've heard from my voice tonight and in the past. And now I'd like you to hear from a younger voice, the voice of a 12 year old girl speaking to her City Council, and I hope that they can hear her. I hope you

have a cell power in the neighborhood and one on the side of your house called a wireless smart meter.

This is from Pittsfield, Massachusetts and Massachusetts and I quote Hi, my name is Amelia. I am 12 years old and I thank you for letting me speak tonight. I have called in to open comments during Pittsfield city council meetings before I have let the mayor and the City Council know that my sister and I have been experiencing symptoms since the cell tower in my neighborhood was turned on. I get dizzy and nausea and sleep with a vomiting bucket near my bed. My sister gets headaches and skin rashes. We both have trouble sleeping. Before Christmas. My little sister had really bad days, the radio frequency radiation in her room measured higher than it ever had. Her symptoms were so bad just from being in the room that my parents had to take her bed out and put it in a room farther away from the tower. During the holiday neighbors came by and told us how they were feeling. Some people live even closer to the tower than we do. There are children younger than us who live right next to it. We learned some of them have constant ringing in their ears and others have vertigo and are actually spending

time in their car, instead of in their home just to get away from the tower. People who can stay elsewhere I've left but this is not sustainable, and it has no way to live. We also learned the neighbor was diagnosed with cancer, we don't want to leave our home. But if we stay where we get cancer to, and quote from a 12 year old girl.

And I know this to be true from speaking with many people with electro sensitivity, that we have terrible symptoms. So the following that I'm going to read to you is from an email that I'm going to forward to each of you that you can delve into it and read and view more about smart meter dangers. And I would ask you also to forward the email for the link to anyone listening to this call, who asks for it. So if you devote some time viewing and reading what's presented in the below reference links, exploring the data science and further links, I don't see how you could in good conscience, continue to continue your present trajectory towards implementing the AMI wireless smart meter program. It's my view, we all should be taking appropriate direction from first the precautionary principle. And second,

excuse me, to people who really inhabit the terrain who are in our midst. And by that I mean, Dr. Shockley and Boulder, and as well as such eminent health experts as Dr. David carpenter and Dr. Deborah Davis, of the environmental health trust, who are among other esteemed and learned experts on this topic of wireless harm. This is also a question of equity. And should everybody have a smart meter in Longmont, and as estimated by the experts, five to 10% of the entire population is electro sensitive whether they know it or not. How is this at all fair? education is key here. So how many people in Longmont actually know what a wireless smart meter is? And when I'm interacting with people in the public, and I ask if they know Longmont is going to roll out smart meters? And are they concerned, more often than not? The answer is what smart meter this happens time and again, how can you be planning on rolling out technology that's not well understood by the public, the majority of which are already convinced by marketing, that anything smart is to their benefit when clearly according to the science, certainly in this case, it is not. I pray you all visit the listed websites in my email, so you can avail yourself of the expertise they're in and then act accordingly. I am an environmentally concerned person and wish for the survival of all life on Earth. But I think there are other safer routes to arrive at the same destination. Dr. Shelley's Emma is an example of a wired project that utilizes solar and battery storage. There's another that I know of in basalt, Colorado, under the auspices of Golden's National Renewable Energy Laboratory are in rail that some of you are familiar with. And you could be asking, Can a network as large and complicated as a national power grid really operate in a decentralized automated way? The authors of the article at the link that I include in this email is say our research says definitely yes. And I know the city has got experimental projects that deal with solar and building electrification. But wouldn't it be smarter if Longmont called for a temporary moratorium on the AMI rollout? When while you gather more information in the goal of 100% renewable energy? Why not explore the future of electrical grids with Dr. Shockley and then rail? Couldn't that lead to the greater good? Especially considering Am I likely to be obsolete before 2030? Probably, and why not consider a pilot program using a prototype of experimental grid models here? Why not let Longmont lead the way man, I appreciate you for your comments. Good. I'm fine. Thank you very much. All right. Appreciate it.

All right. All right. No questions or comments? All right. Next caller. Okay. Caller ending in 515 caller ending in 515.

You should be able to unmute yourself. star six to unmute.

And you can state your name and address for the record and you have five minutes

caller 515 looks like you're unmuted but we can't quite hear you

Let's try it. Let's try the next one and we'll come back and try again. Yeah, try. Try

when you can.

Thank you. This is Mike snots Meyer. Yes. six nine Hotel tober Road. Honorable Mayor Bagley and city council regarding effective post COVID recovery as a longtime advocate for St. Rain flood mitigation and climate change resilience, and there's an original co founder of sustainable resilient Longmont, startup Longmont and the Tinker will. I wanted to personally extend kudos and my gratitude to city council, city staff, and the Climate Action Task Force for the tremendous progress being made in moving Longmont towards a more climate resilient future. It's been 14 years now since I first stood before the council, in an effort to raise awareness and action on mitigating the threat of a potential and imminent $300 million catastrophic 100 year flood event. Here Today, I wanted to also commend the city and staff which truly fantastic job they were doing in the same train or SDP project since that event actually did occur. Well, I do applaud this great flood mitigation work being performed. It is important to recognize that this work is being done largely in reaction to the flood event, not proactively to avoid it because it was not considered practical to do so at the time. As a consequence, arguably hundreds of millions of dollars has been lost in public and private wealth, and possibly millions more by missing out on being viable contenders for huge post disaster funding opportunities, such as the 2 billion national disaster resilience competition.

For me, the number one lesson to be learned from the 2013 flood is that it demonstrated that the cost of inaction often for exceeds the cost of proactively taking action. Today our society in Longmont faces multiple unprecedented, unprecedented and concurrent existential threats. These threats need to be addressed proactively with an approach of long term holistic systems thinking, not analog thinking and not reactively. As a new administration is established in Washington and federal agencies began shifting policy focus to addressing a climate crisis. It can be anticipated that hundreds of billions of federal dollars and trillions of private sector investment will be directed at this effort. Having visionary initiatives and actionable projects, these multiple concurrent crises will be critical to being a viable contender for participation in this massive economic transformation. Having climate resilience, digital technology and structural social change at the core of the city's COVID recovery actions will be central to any successful economic recovery effort in long months future. Here's one vision for such a future. Longmont has become

long on has become a national leader in modeling recovery from the COVID COVID crisis and economic downturn by emerging with a robust and thriving economy, including widespread jobs and new business creation. key to the success has been the city's response not only to the pandemic downturn, but also by being actively engaged in using using holistic systems thinking approaches to address multiple and unprecedented concurrent threats of climate change, global ecological degradation, the digital age revolution, massive jobs distributions, urban sprawl, and core systemic socio economic issues. I've been working on an informal framework and list of questions that I hope to soon share with council that may inspire discussions around the more systemic thinking approach to long Let's call the recovery. Here are three if I have time of those many questions regarding climate change and massive funding. How can the city encourage the development of denser netzero walkable carfree 20 minute complete community projects? How can the long long month position itself the visionary projects and initiatives to become a leading contender in the national and global competition for massive grant funding and business investments? Regarding the pandemic? How can Longmont develop test trace and track protocols and demonstrate them to the public in a more acceptable manner, rapid roll and the bounded future possible more contagious in more detail.

pandemics. Finally, regarding the digital age revolution, 5g and smart city tech, how can the city begin to design, demonstrate and deploy digital 5g Smart City technologies through local projects, and safely roll them out in a manner acceptable to the residents affected?

That's five minutes. little over five minutes. But thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

All right, next caller.

All right, caller anything 576576, you should be able to unmute yourself and state your name and address for the record. And then you'll have five minutes. Thank you. My name is Susan Fisher. I'm another

person speaking about the village cooperative, my address is 2435 Lilly CT unit 302.

And first, I'd like to thank Councilman waters for helping us figure out what this process is about it's it's new to us.

Secondly, I'd like to be sure that you know exactly where we're located, which is basically the south east corner of highway 66, and Alpine. So knowing that, you know that it's already, the density of building here is just amazing.

So another thing that I just have some a few additional facts that Jim covered a lot of our territory. And by the way, Jim is on our board of directors.

But you need to know that the proposed increased density lots are not just houses across the street from us, we're actually legally tied through

action that our developer took before we moved in. We are in a master Hoa with these houses.

So we're feeling very left in the dark,

by our developer, at the same time, as we're legally tied to being in community with them with these, these people that will move in here.

Clearly, these are not going to be

they're going to be expensive homes, they're not affordable housing, and they're not on a transit corridor.

We feel like so we have one

narrow court that comes into that property and services, both sides of the street, both that individual homes as well as our building. And it's definitely too narrow for parking.

Because if there was parking on it, there would be no ability to access for emergency vehicles or trash pickup vehicles. So the land mass that was rightfully so clouded by the, you know, city planning to have eight homes, now they're proposing double that. And there's not enough land there to allow for either an access road or overflow parking on their land. And what we're saying is there has to be because

they can't park on Lillie court, because, again, it would block access to our emergency vehicles. So the other and really big issue is the lack of traffic control on Alpine and highway 66.

And we are also directly across Alpine, from prairie village villas, which are currently being built and will include 44 parrot homes, which means 88 units. So we feel for all these reasons

that it it just is not possible scenario. And we just are trying to find any way we can to be involved in the discussion around this, because our developers not sharing that with us. We'd also like access to any traffic control studies that have been done on Alpine in our area of highway 66.

Because that would definitely affect the discussion around increasing, you know, any any increase of density that's already so dense in this area. So thanks so much for listening.

Thank you. All right, next caller.

All right.

Caller ending in 722722. You should be able to unmute yourself and state your name and address for the record and then you have five minutes.

Hi Mayor Bagley and city council. My name is Lynette McLean and I'm calling in to ask to talk

About

the air quality issues, and I just like to ask a couple questions about what the city council is planning to do about a couple things. One, I wondered if you were planning on developing some sort of an action plan in response to that Senate Bill 181. And then I wonder if, just like one of the other callers asked, if you had a plan to address the violations of the oil and gas companies that are currently poisoning are poisoning our

air, residents can track the data are on the website, fold air b o LD a r.com. And based on the data from that level on that site, the oil companies have been venting and polluting our air and then have released seven times the normal amount of methane, and also butane and benzene gases that are not safe at any level. And

the data shows that a pattern of increase

is occurring on most mornings, but the recent venting has been so high that it couldn't even be measured with the equipment at the monitoring station. And this type of air pollution can cause respiratory illness, cancer, and many other health issues. And it's especially harmful to children and vulnerable adults. And people can learn more about health effects of air quality, poor air quality at the physicians for social responsibility website that's psr.org. And they have studied, they're studying this.

The the state regulations

prohibit Banting. And they require old oil companies to notify the government or

notify local governments

if they're doing anything that's going to cause pollution, or if they are, if they're going to prevent adverse environmental impacts on on any air, water, soil or biological resources resulting from their operations, and what they're going to do to protect, minimize the impacts. And I don't believe they're doing that. But I'd be interested to know if if they have

to do or if they're, I'd like to know if there's any information about what they what they have offered.

The city of Longmont does have a vision to be 100% renewable by 2030. And I just believe that the fracking activities of our local gas or oil companies are not taking us in that direction. And I'm asking you please to work with other local entities and the state to stop this pollution that's affecting our health. Thank you.

Thank you.

All right, next caller.

All right, caller ending in eight to nine caller ending an eight to nine, you should be able to unmute yourself and state your name and address for the record.

Caller call it eight to nine. It's star six to unmute yourself.

We're down to what six, seven? Could this could this be 898 by any chance instead? Nope. This is eight to nine. Okay.

You can go ahead and mute me again. I just want to make Oh, eight to nine. Okay.

eight to nine. We'll come back to you. Let's move on to 904 collared nine. So

1-234-567-8910 looks like 10 even just curious. Yep. All right. Caller 904. It looks like you were able to unmute yourself. Go ahead and state your name and address for the record and then you have five minutes.

Thank you so much. My name is Judy lubao. And I live at 106. Grenada court in Longmont.

First, I wanted to thank the mayor and city council for your efforts in in all your public service and also listening to listening to the citizens. It's been very interesting, and very long tonight so I can I can only say kudos to you for this effort. What I'm concerned about tonight is air pollution and several other callers have raised the same issue.

It has to do with the flares that the data the monitoring has shown recently. Huge spikes for methane about seven times the normal amount

Plus emissions of butane and benzene, which should not be admitted in the air at all. And I'm very concerned that that's happened. And that perhaps the state is not doing much. And I don't know if the city is doing much about it. But it's really a transgression. And it's not helping people with with any kind of lung problems. So I would hope that the city is planning to do something and not treating business as usual, having flares that we've seen from last week. So I appreciate your attention to this matter. And again, thank you for your public service.

Thank you. Here's a question. Please stay on the line.

Thank you very badly, I just wanted to reiterate that we're going to have a presentation, I think on February 7, about the gas and oil so.

And maybe some of your questions will be answered. Thank you. Thank you.

All right, next question.

All right, our next caller, your phone number ends in eight to nine. We're going to give you a try again.

eight to nine. I'm going to ask you to unmute

caller eight to nine.

There you are. Nope, sorry. 898. So I didn't know if sorry, yeah. This is not the correct color. Man. If you could give us just a minute. Your phone number ends in 798. So

eight to nine.

If you can hear us, there's about a 20 to 32nd delay if you're watching the live stream.

So go ahead and hit star nine. I'm sorry, star six, eight to nine. Caller eight to nine. We're trying to unmute you.

I will move on to the next caller. Caller 336336. I'm going to ask you to unmute There you are.

Good evening, Mayor and councilmembers. This is the yeas at 245 Kelly drive unit I first of all, I want to thank you for giving us the opportunity to raise our current there are two topics that I kind of wanted to address. The first is I want to echo the concern from the first caller. I think the first past the post collection system that he had been using has caused a lot of damage nationally, especially in polarizing the country. So either a single transferable vote or a ranked choice voting system will give voters the chance to vote based on their preferred candidate. rather than worrying about who's going to win an election. This might not seem like a big issue for Longmont, especially being a smaller city. But I think this sets up a good example for the whole of Colorado.

Secondly, I want to voice my support for the initiative to install smart meters across the city, then having smart meters gives us the data we need as homeowners to understand how we use electricity and water consuming power in our house. If we reach our goal of reducing our power usage, this is a critical piece of that information. And I know that some of our neighbors have raised concerns about the safety of radiation. It is critical that any decisions are based on facts, we need to distinguish between ionizing and non ionizing radiation. Having previously worked in electromagnetic compatibility lab or EMC lab, I came with great constancy that the health risks associated with non ionizing radiation is almost non existent. Even at an extremely high radiation level, it is essentially only causing heating. And even that is falling off as a function of one over r squared. So essentially, the farther you get away from it substantially faster that radiation levels falls off. There are some valid concerns about cost and privacy that has been raised. But we should let the decisions be dictated by facts and not by fear of ionizing radiation. And finally, one small anecdote that I wanted to share is that at my brother's house in Michigan, he recently had a smart meter installed, and the information that he got about what equipment was using what power was really valuable for him just getting a sense of what is using power. And getting that information to have hands of homeowners is really going to help get the public educated. And that's going to education is going to lead to people choosing equipment that consumes less power. So again, thanks for the opportunity.

And I'll keep it short. All right. Councillor Martin.

Thank you for your call. I agree with what you said.

I'd also like to reassure you that in 2018, when we first started talking about an ami rollout, that I brought up the very points that you've been raising about privacy.

And a while we have not yet seen the final requirements for a smart meter proposal, I hope that

that the encryption of the data transmission as well as the security of the

meter data management system,

will will be paramount and that no data will come out. That is not depersonalized.

Thank you, Councilmember Martin.

Thank you, sir. All right, next caller.

Thank you.

The next caller, your phone number is 533. I'm going to ask you to unmute 533

Yeah, hi. Thank you, Matt. menza 2235 Parkview in Longmont. Thank you, Mayor. And thank you, counsel. Can you hear me all right.

Yes.

All right. Great. Hey, I just wanted a couple comments. First, I was a little shocked that your resolution tonight was talking about

denouncing the Capitol, right by violence, which is, you know, certainly any right minded person would would disagree that any violence, especially on the on our capital is atrocious. But I didn't hear you guys talking about anything related to small businesses or the schools and our children or mental health. So I guess with that said it would be appropriate than if we look back over the year. And insurance companies in the media just talked about the $2 billion in damage over 100 people injured from the riots and looting 95% linked to BLM and anti Tifa riots over the last year. So I think it'd be appropriate if the City Council also passed a resolution denouncing the BLM and anti Tifa riots that were absolutely not mostly peaceful, because that equated into $2 billion worth of damage. 150 innocent store owners hurt killed over 10 Toronto store owners damaged and murdered and a lot of violence. So the statement by the local area democrats that clearly

misses the point or is delusional or kind of disturbing, that there's a lot of civil unrest going on in the country, we need to be fair about if we're going to be talking as a community about violence and uncivil behavior, then we need to be fair about it let's, let's pass a resolution denouncing all the violence that we've seen over the last year as well, that would be appropriate and equivocal and it would be it Tell your voters out there that we're not we're not just a crazy delusional city we actually understand that there's multifaceted issues here they're they're hurting our minds. So let's be fair, let's pass a resolution to denounces that violence to

on another topic, the park I think there's a lot of people that saw what you did for the left hand Canyon or left hand Creek 100 meter long bike path that you publish as unlawful and illegal activity. That was disturbing to a lot of the your constituents and voters that think that your your focus in your your behavior is actually kind of absurd, because the people you know who live here and are smart, understand environmental concerns and understand that you ripped up 50 trees just in widen pike Avenue. And you're concerned about children playing in the treeline. Calling that unlawful, and illegal and environmentally dangerous is absolutely absurd. So I'm really appalled at what you're doing. Actually, there's a lot of people that don't support you. And I think that the council needs to be turned over as quickly as possible because you don't support the children. You use strong language like illegal activity for children riding a bike in a 100 meter space, and I guarantee park in a park that we use all the time. And you know, and I live here, my kids ride there all the time. And it's great ride with him and there's nothing that I would support in terms of hurting the environment. And it's actually a very nice place for kids to get away and enjoy themselves and you get taken away. So I think that's unfortunate. I think that says a lot about the leadership. And I pray that the folks here in Longmont wake up and and make some changes politically because I think we need it we need better leadership, instead of passing resolutions about the Capitol, which we all do. But we all know that the narratives spoken by mainstream media and you focus on Longmont and what we need here and we need to stop being the fun sponges we need.

To start taking care of our kids and our parks and looking at solutions other than just taking down biking trails, so thank you. And I do hope that you all have a good year and continue to serve well for a long month and make better decisions. Thank you very much. We've got a couple Hands up if you want to stick around. The other way I'm gonna take I'm gonna take mayor's prerogative, I usually don't go first. I always go last. But I'd like to just start a sixth system unit. How do you want me to do it? Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no need to meet No need to be the I just wanted to let you know. So I'm, I believe I'm the only non democrat on Council. And so maybe that lends a little extra weight. But here's the reason why I voted for the resolution tonight. That is this is way different than the BLM or an Tifa protests. This is not left versus right. This is not about violence. This was a day when our country beginning in 1776, when this all started our government, our government was established so that at the time 13, but now it's 50 different governments come together to choose a collective president this day, although ceremonial is the day that legally and constitutionally is what determines who will be our next president.

And having someone whether it's the president or whoever,

basically call and incite people, not necessarily you can say it wasn't violent, you can choose word choice, but encouraging people to go to the Capitol to put pressure on Congress to interfere in that election was wholly inappropriate, holy, entering that Capitol Building, the United States representative government of me and this municipality and all other municipalities was highly not only inappropriate, it was illegal, it was wrong. It puts in danger. 250 years of

our country passing from one president to the next, the appropriate venue is the voting booth in 2024. It's not taking and storming the Capitol Building, to scream and yell, and hail and damage. So go ahead and agree with I don't get the gray with your, you know, with your confirmation of what happened. I don't believe that was appropriate at all, either. But we've got it, we've got to be fair about what's happening. You know, we spend $750 billion a year on defense. And you're telling me in less than an hour 200 idiots breached the capital. I mean, this is not a fair representation with that being America. And I don't see Longman denouncing

the fact that we've had $2 billion of damage and serious threats against innocent people throughout the country from we're not mostly peaceful rights. And I want to see that as a major issue two, because that's a very serious issue where a lot of people are afraid to go into bigger big cities. Now they're sprayed to go downtown. They're afraid to go anywhere in Denver because of the an Tifa and the the riots and the homeless and all these other things that are becoming very violent and very, very critical. The safety of our people. And so yes, what happened, but we had remember, you have 500,000 plus people watching DC on six January, and you had a couple 100 idiots that acted like look like animals, and they're all going to get their due process. But I want to see fairness from what you guys are doing and saying in terms of your narrative that better represents the thoughts and feelings of your constituents in this community. You know, and I hear what you're saying. I don't think this council is a is for violence. But everything you just mentioned, happens outside Longmont. What happened on the sixth impacted Longmont? It put at risk our republican? Oh, sure. Did. Sure it did. What would have happened? I mean, come on, man. I mean, I'm with you. I'm with you. I both are typically I'm with you. But in this particular case, when someone loses an election, you don't do that these these 200 people don't storm the building. I mean, I'm sorry, but they were Trump supporters. I mean, they weren't 20 No.

32 Brian 232 people were arrested for those rights. They were LinkedIn, Tifa and BLM. Come on you guys. Come on. Nobody. Nobody agreed with the violence. I certainly didn't agree with it. But I just think you guys are barking up a very, very radical narrative. And I think it's unfortunate. Well, if if basically speaking out vehemently as a mayor to say do not interrupt the Electoral College, when they're picking a new president, call me radical.

No, I think that's fine. I think that's fine, but I want to see you denounce the other violence and third, for the last year actually, quite frankly.

saying, I am this denounce, like, we're not gonna tell the resolution on everything. This was an important one.

All right, Dr. Waters.

Yeah. Just for your reference, cuz just to remind you in for the caller, we did pass a resolution announcing the violence associated with demonstrate peaceful demonstrations. We denounced all violence associated with those and Mr. Mendez, you might want to go back. My notes don't go back to the June meetings, but I believe it was in a June meeting, that we adopted a resolution doing exactly that. So when you referenced fairness, and balance, so in fairness, you might want to go back and read all that we've done, number one, number two, I'm curious, with your criticism of our unwillingness to support children. I wonder how much you know about what we've done with our Early Childhood Initiative that supports not only young children, their families, but our business community and their employees, health care providers, Main Street businesses. I wonder what you know about our 529 Jeff program in investing?

Sir, I got the floor desk for a minute. Hold on one sec. Well, Mr. Mendez, we'll let you talk in just a second. This will be a good back and forth. Sure. Well, that's why we do this. So we all get smarter about the issues. And one of them is the investment we're making in every kindergartener, Justin might not just in Longmont, but in the entire school district to signal to them the confidence we have in their potential, and in reasons for evidence based reasons for investing in their college, their college investment portfolios or funds. So we may not be doing enough and you may clearly don't like what we what we decided in terms of the

the bike path, right and left hand Creek. But to suggest we've done nothing for children is simply a lack of information, I suppose. And to suggest that we have a condemned other violence is also a lack of information. So those are, you know, things we've done, you might want to learn something about?

Well, I think first of all, I think if you're doing things for children in our community, and let's do a better job at selling it. Meaning let's let people know more about that. Let's focus more on the long run issues. The national issues here in Longmont. So that's good. If in June, you denounced the violence that was occurring in the country. Great. I haven't seen it. Again, it goes back to you. And the council's selling your your your stuff, and I pay attention and I guess I missed it in June. So if you did great. That's that's absolutely fabulous. And that's the right thing to do. At shows responsibility, and equitable, you know, perspective and all the issues. Yep. Mirror back, remind me one more comment. I understand that I understand the idea of the selling what we've done. But there's a point in time, Mr. minnis, where you have a responsibility to pay attention to what we're doing.

Oh,

do it in public. I have emails.

Like Martha Martin telling us that, you know, we we don't know how to think they have the public does not have thing. We need to be told what to do by government. I have all of you I've been paying attention. If I missed one of your resolutions, then the new one that one, and I appreciate you speaking out against violence. Thank you. It's not a competition. I'm not trying to one up. I'm just saying we do what we do in public. We're on the record every Tuesday night. It's your town hall. There's no hiding behind that. It's as transparent as it can be. But it's your job

to pay attention to what we're doing. You'll be rewarded.

Again, thank you. All right. Thanks, Counselor Christiansen

if you're still on the line,

this isn't really about politics, as mayor badly said, this is about

your you are equating people who marched this summer and for the last year, because to redress and to draw attention to the fact that for 400 years, black people in this country have been treated

worse than dogs. And they are finally tired of it. That is a very different situation from people who are flying in on jets to stay in four star hotels and then marching in the streets and some of the members not most of the members, there were 1000s of people there. But when people are

illegally going into the Capitol, to overthrow the results of 80 million voters in this country, to overthrow our government essentially threatening to murder members of our government. That's a very different thing. They are not the same

Same. So this isn't about politics or, you know, one side balancing the other. This is about insurrection. And it's wrong, as the mayor said, and I appreciated

everything that the mayor said. Thank you.

All right, Councilman viago. fairing. Mr. Mendez, I will admit, you have hit upon the topic that is woken up council tonight. This is a good forum now. All right, Councilmember Duggal fairing? Well, I think it's too important to clarify our rationale for doing this. I'm a public school teacher, I have children at home, I have a child with a disability, I will do everything and anything in my power to support initiatives that support children.

The issue and so one thing I want to add to what Dr. Walters had said about all the work that the council and the city has done for children, the other one was maxlite, when we went to online learning, I only had three kids in my classroom who had access to internet. So I had to connect the other 20 to find them, internet and next slide our city came through. And it was because of this council before you and the city staff that work diligently and we prioritize to ensure that kids have what they need, so they can be successful, so they can have those issues. And then a point just for clarification to um, according to the armed conflict location and event data project, who is their national organization that does just data research. One of the things is when they looked at all the protests, racial justice protests that occurred from the George Floyd murder on 93% of them were peaceful protests, I have engaged in those peace, peaceful protests with my educational colleagues, because we have students of color in our classrooms. I've dealt with racism, my life, I've been in places where they were wet back, go back to Mexico, you don't belong here. Okay, I've dealt with that all my life. There's a big difference between what happened at the Capitol and what happened with these, right with protests with a black lives matter protest. And I think Councilmember Christians, Councilmember Christiansen hit the nail on the head 400 years of oppression, in, in argument to our comparing to

a potential overthrow of our government. Those are two different issues. And we did write up in the resolution. And I know because I wrote it, denouncing the riots and the violence. That is not how we get things done. So thank you for your call. All right. That was a good one. That was a good one. All right. What 761 Minute.

We have seven more. All right, let's keep going. The next caller, your phone number ends in 798. I'm gonna ask you to unmute 798

this is Virginia farmer from Fort Collins, Colorado.

Thank you, you may begin. Okay, I'd like to address the city of Longmont near smart, smart meter program. I'm a currently I lost a son in 2008, who was a student on the SDSU campus. And there was a cell tower involved which

actually caused a brain cancer cluster of people on campus, this one cell tower could transmit 200 miles

east west and 100 miles north south. That's one cell tower. That anyway, the cell tower is called heparan. Its high performance wireless research and educational network. And what it is is mission control for San Diego Gas and Electric among, among many, many other government agencies. But anyway, I'm in the film called take back your power. And I'm also currently involved in a I'm a petitioner suing the FCC with some large law firms and the children's health defense and the environmental health trust and there was a gentleman that called him that said this low frequency stuff is not harmful and I adamantly disagree with him. Basically, ionizing radiation

causes damage to your cells and your DNA immediately and non ionizing radiation which is why

Wireless is cumulative. So the more that you receive, the more damage that will occur. And you can look up EHS symptoms, electro hypersensitivity symptoms, and these are very real and they are very familiar to me. Anyway, the city of Fort Collins estimated our Smart Grid This was in 2009 at $350 million in each in each smart meter was $322. And I consider this robbery. Since smart meters a true costs are around $50 each. And in Fort Collins. The 2010 status report clearly stated that the smart grid and the meters were to cost resident residents nothing. Since the installation starting in 2012. We have had nothing but huge rate increases. One again this year, smart meters are depreciated, meaning residents will never be done paying for these cheap plastic computer board digital meters. Fort Collins deployed smart meters in 2012 2013. And since the deployment since then, they've had to replace 20 30,000 of these meters in 2018. This also proves that smart meters have a life lifespan of around five to seven years. Analog meters lasts between 50 to 80 years and there's nothing sustainable about the smart grid. Smart Meters do cause fires. This has been confirmed to me by pooter Valley Fire Department Fort Collins. Residents are unaware that the utilities own the meters and the boxes but they do not own the wiring in the walls of a building. The wireless wiring will always be shown to be the cause of a smart meter fire and homeowners and business owners are left with paying for the damages. These fires are known to spread directly to the roof of a building leaving unaware residents of damage, harm or even death. Smart Meters emit pulsed radiation wireless radiation per 20 for the 2018 NTP national toxicology program study showing clear evidence of harm can now be wireless can now be classified as a class one carcinogen, the same as benzene and Miss pestis and Lloyds of London and Ari Swiss are both underwriters for insurance companies. They have never nor will they ever ensure the wireless industry. You utilities own maintain and operate their equipment and smart meters are their equipment. homeowners are paying approximately $110 per year for the 20 473 65 data transmissions. This should be paid by the utilities, not the homeowners and business owners. The smart grid and smart meters are riddled with fraud upon the American American public, you now have then you now have the knowledge of the health effects costs and fires. There are now major lawsuits against the FCC. So we're suing over health effects in the science proving harm. And I also wanted to mention that I'm

smart meters

are not good for the environment whatsoever. This is not sustainable. And this is harming our environment. It's harming every living organism. It's it's harming our trees, our bees, our kids, our homes, and this is pulse radiation. And it's a constant pulse radiation. And I'm asking you, the City Council and the mayor to do your due diligence in your decisions and please put a moratorium on these meters. Thank you. Thank you, man.

All right, next caller.

next caller. I'm going to go back to eight to nine. Let's try that one more time. eight to nine. I'm going to ask you to unmute

eight to nine. Can you hit star six on your phone if you hear me?

caller eight to nine.

Okay, not seeing any action there. I'm going to go on to the next caller. Caller 332. I'm going to ask you to unmute 332

There you are.

Yeah, hi. Um, so my name is Seth Miller. I live at 1025 neon force circle in prospect, and I'm with you to talk to you about green energy and economics.

To start I'd like to commend Longmont for its recent work to evaluate the installation of solar and parking lots and on the rooftops of its properties throughout the state.

The quoted prices have turned out to be unbelievably low several at about $1 per watt, which is less than half of what they would have cost four years ago. I'm speaking out now to encourage the city to expand more more aggressively into these distributed energy resources to lower both our carbon footprint and the cost of our electricity. Now, it's become almost trite in the world of energy to point out that renewables are now cheaper than fossil fuels, extracting resources from the sky is free, whereas extracting them from the ground requires diggers and haulers and miles of trains cars, train cars for transport. generating energy from the sky is clean, whereas burning coal and gas is hot and suffocating and dangerous. In a world run by fossil fuels, it made sense to generate power in a central location, far from the city. But with solar energy, we no longer need to separate generation from the people. The technology to locally generate and store electricity has over the last few years become cheap enough to be competitive, and we should invest in it and consider how we can benefit from solar is less sexy partner in green energy lithium batteries. Longmont pays trpa the Platte River Power Authority, a fee called a demand charge to compensate for the cost of meeting or peak generation and transmission needs. In fact, about 40% of the city's build a PRP A is for these demand charges, rather than for the electricity itself. And so we can save a significant amount of money simply by smoothing out our consumption, storing renewable energy and lithium batteries during times of peak supply, and releasing it again at times of peak demand. We drop our peak consumption and we drop our demand charges, leaving more money in the pockets of every ratepayer in the city. Now as a Longmont resident who works in the energy storage industry, I want to spread the word that a small scale storage project, roughly the size of the solar projects that we've studied, should pay for itself in less than three years. Now, a three year payback is almost unheard of in the energy industry. But that's how much pricing has changed recently, just like solar, the economics of storage have shifted. And we can lower the electricity bills for the entire community if we take advantage of this. So how would we do it? I'm, I'm a consultant. So of course, I believe the first step is to create a detailed long term plan. In 2019, we amended our contract with PRP a to allow us to locally generate resources. But we haven't thought deeply about the opportunity this gives us it's now time, we can by studying we can learn quickly how much solar and batteries our distribution system can tolerate. And we can identify what savings we can reap. And beyond this immediate financial impact, a study of distributed energy can consider two other benefits to the community. The first is jobs, every megawatt we bring to the local grid should add eight local construction and maintenance jobs. A city the size of Longmont should have the capacity to integrate 10s of megawatts of solar at lower costs than the energy transmitted from trpa and thereby create hundreds of well paid local jobs. The second is of course, a greener planet. incentives to install home solar sounds like they'll only benefit the sensibilities of Tesla driving upper middle class homeowner. But with a proper integration plan, they'll actually help every ratepayer in the city. Because green is the new cheap. The cost to create a master plan for distributed energy would be a rounding error relative to the investment or recommends paid for almost immediately by the first project. We've had the power to act on this since 2019. But now with costs where there are today, there's no further reason for delay. If we start now, by the end of 2022, long one could extend its local power generation to create jobs and money, literally from thin air. So on behalf of every resident long month, I'd like to urge you that it's time to act. Thank you. Thank you, sir.

Okay, you got a thumbs up from Councilmember back. So the record reflect and Councilmember Martin anybody Councilmember Christiansen and Dr. waters and and Councilmember daga ferry, Mayor Pro Tem Rodriguez is stone cold and just just just looking. Alright, so let's go ahead and do the next caller.

All right, a caller 528528. You should be able to unmute yourself and state your name and address for the record.

Hello, can you hear me? We can go ahead and state your name and address and you have five more

Okay, thank you. Good evening council members. My name is Anita Lee, and I live on conifer court in Boulder. Thank you for hosting this open forum. I want to speak to you about the virtue of critical thinking, and how the censorship of doctors and scientists harms public policy, specifically regarding COVID, and the lockdown.

Since April, I've been learning from scientists who present views of COVID that contradict the official narratives. These experts are from the United States, Germany, Ireland, Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden. They are doctors, biologists, immunologist and epidemiologists.

I never appear them on NPR, the BBC or CNN, and they are censored on YouTube. Why are scientists being censored? Science requires debate, different voices must be heard in order to arrive at the truth. But with COVID only one narrow stream of opinion is allowed and others are censored.

It is up to you as public servants to investigate and think it through. You are responsible to think it through and you are capable, you can be heroes, you can examine evidence and you can reduce fear with fact.

I will give two examples, and I will send you some links to back these up.

One, in March of 2020, the CDC issued new rules for how to write death certificates. The new rules apply only to COVID cases, and they inflate the COVID fatality rate.

statisticians have examined the data.

If hospitals were using the normal time tested procedures for death certificates, the COVID death rate would be 90% lower than what we have been told. Why does COVID have unique rules for death certificates? Please think about that. I'll send you some information.

Number two, early treatment options have been proven to keep mild cases of COVID from escalating. But they are being supported by the CDC and the NIH.

Dr. Pierre corys. Senate testimony on December eighth, described the research showing doctors success using ivermectin to treat COVID to save lives. But the NIH has been dragging its feet on approving it widespread use. I will send you some information about that.

I believe that if you study this, you can be less afraid yourself and you can help others to be less afraid.

Finally, the cure must not be worse than the disease. Restrictions on small businesses are destroying the economic independence of many people. There is a tent village in Boulder along Boulder Creek with those folks be living outside if the economy was where it was a year ago. The Cure must not be worse than the disease.

When you perhaps you think you're following the science when you follow the advice of the public health officials. But I say that science requires debate. And the debate on COVID is very lively all around the world.

censorship does not erase truth. It just makes it harder to find. As public servants, you must not blindly follow the dictates of unelected bureaucrats. You have a moral responsibility to engage in critical thinking and use a multi variant analysis as you make policy that affects us. I will send you information to help you with that. And I thank you for your time.

merit looks like a few council members here have their hands raised. Yeah, I said Councilmember Peck. Oh,

I did not hear you. Thank you. Um, so I need to thank you for this information. But I do have a question for you. You say that our death statistics are being

are not are not right. They're untrue in the United States, but what about the statistics in the other parts of the world?

Do you think CDC is squashing those as well? Or, or inventing numbers that are not correct? Because

we are not just looking at the United States. We are not just taking information from the United States but from the World Health Organization. So when different different reasonings, I guess come out about our statistics, I'm always curious as to

To whether we are talking about just us or the World Health.

Can you answer that, please?

Well, I, I have not looked at how death certificates are written in other countries. I do find it shocking that the CDC invented special rules for COVID in the United States, and I think it's

alarming. And no, I don't know about death certificates in other countries. And where did you get the information that CDC has written different rules?

Initially from the CDC website, and more recently from

documents relating to a lawsuit in Ohio.

Okay. And I will send I will send that to you. Oh, perfect. Thank you very much.

All right.

Thank you. Are you aware of a statistic known as excess deaths?

Yes.

So how do you account for the fact that if if

COVID deaths are being over reported that the number of excess deaths this year as opposed to last year is consistent with the number of

of reported COVID deaths?

Well, I read a study from someone at Johns Hopkins who said the exact opposite.

I beg your pardon. She said that she read it something from somebody something published by john hopkins, it was the exact opposite. Yes, I understood that what she said I just, I'm not sure what that means.

We're saying that that john hopkins says the excess deaths are inconsistent with the reporting.

I'm I'm saying that it well, first of all, it wasn't the entire university. It was one person, one economist.

And she said that there she does not see excess debts.

The only question that but okay.

Could you give us the name of that person? Because an economist isn't really much of an expert on public health?

Well, I mean, she is an expert on statistics.

Okay, I don't I don't have I don't have the name off the top of my head. But I have the article on my computer. Okay. Well, yes, you could forward that was that would be interesting.

Are you talking about the

the way that COVID is? When COVID is what primarily kills people, but their comorbidities?

Are you saying that it's actually the comorbidities that killed someone not COVID? I mean, right. Even the CDC has said that 94% of COVID deaths had serious comorbidities. And the old way Delta typically written was there's a primary cause of death. And then in section two of the death certificate, other factors are listed are.

But for COVID, there's a different

there's a different form of death certificate. So now with COVID,

even suspected COVID it can be listed as the cause of death, even if the person was not tested.

And that's the CDC. Well, most people were not tested. I, for instance, had COVID. But my doctor wouldn't allow me to be tested because at that time, in March, only people who were of medical people were allowed to be tested because there weren't enough tests. I would say that the actual number of COVID test COVID cases and COVID deaths in the United States were considerably higher than anything we we are seeing and

we will never know because it was handled. So really abysmally badly. But

that it would there would be different rules for death certificates for one. I would have, I'll have to look at what the CDC says about that. But yeah, anyway, I thank you for

calling in. I am a big advocate of critical thinking which was removed from

our state colleges as a requirement for

for graduation by the republican party when they were in power, I was working at the University of Colorado and I was rather astonished to see critical thinking removed as one of the, which is really the main thing that you learn at a university. So

we do all need to be doing more critical thinking. So thanks for calling in and reminding us. Thank you. Right Thank you. Next caller.

All right caller ending in 635635. You should be able to unmute yourself and state your name and address for the record, you have five minutes. My name is Shaquille doll, my phone my area. My address is 609 Terry Street. I'm calling because I'm concerned about the mode and pace of new construction in the city of Longmont. Like many members of the city council, I'm very concerned about environmental sustainability, financial sustainability for the city, and the growth of Longmont in terms of both new people moving here and new construction in the city. I think one manifestation of these issues is in the financial sustainability of the construction of certain types of housing and retail stores in Longmont. My understanding is that when a new subdivision is built, once all the pots are sold and the homes built, eventually the city of Longmont assumes responsibility for the maintenance of the infrastructure supporting those homes. That means the roads in the neighborhood the sewers that are underground electrical distribution lines, fire protection and public safety. And of course, many other things that I don't even know about. My concern is about the value of those properties, the tax revenue they generate for the city. And in comparison, the amortized cost of the infrastructure which will eventually be borne by the city. If sewer lines need to be replaced every 20 years, but the tax base of that development doesn't generate enough revenue, the replacement of those sewer lines will wind up being subsidized by the city. What that means is that people have properties that are more in keeping with long months historical development pattern will wind up subsidizing new unsustainable development. A simple remedy to this problem would be to require as part of a development application, a calculation of the projected tax revenue generated by the development compared to the cost of the infrastructure replacement. If when a development is built, we know in advance that we'll have to replace the streets in 10 years, the sewers in 20 years and the electrical distribution lines in 30 years. I think the city should know in advance that the development make the that the development makes economic sense, not just for the property owners, but for everyone in the community. Thank you.

Thank you, Shaquille.

Yeah, you expressed the same concerns. I think that we all have.

And so it's it's a, it's a it's a fine line to walk between development at a pace that will allow us to keep housing affordable, but not ruin what, what we all agree is a is a small town field. So All right, next caller.

All right, caller 084 callers. 084.

Hello, hello, you can state your name and address for the record and you have five minutes. Thank you. This is David Goldberg 200 East 23rd Street in Loveland. I wanted to thank you,

Mayor Begley and all the council members, who I sincerely believe are trying to keep an open mind towards the proposed rollout of smart meters in Longmont, which I oppose.

I had hoped to have a slice of a an award winning documentary which actually Virginia who was on the call, couple of callers back reference, and she's in that video, or some slides, which actually showed

physiological effects of microwave radiation on the human body now.

Well, I know you have heard multiple times from callers calling in about health effects of radiofrequency radiation, including from smart meters. This this actual app excerpt was taken and experiment performed by Dr. Frank, spring Bob, a chiropractic physician using a technique called dark field microscopy to actually study the effect on red blood cells in the human body when exposed to smart meters.

And what he did was take three subjects, measured their blood, and then expose them both to analog meters into smart meters. I would have loved to show you again what it looks like but I'll describe it to you. I'm looking at it right now. So first, he said he took the sample of regular healthy red blood cells in all three of the subjects and they're beautifully round forms spread out

shaped, and there's no inconsistency or damage to any of the cells, then what he did was took the three subjects, put them one,

one foot away from an analog meter for two minutes, read took the their blood results, and studied those. And the cells looked exactly like the same, like the control group where they were, there was no damage at all to the cells, they were spread out and free flowing. He then expose them to all three subjects to Smart Meter radiation for two minutes apiece, one foot away from the smart meter. And what you can see and it's striking, is damaged cells that are inconsistently shaped, serrated edges, and the cells are actually clotting together and unable to move, like the non smart meter radiated cells.

So what he concluded from this was that the, the harm of this is that these red blood cells were then unable to in this state where they're misformed, and unable to flow freely, they are unable to carry oxygen to all the parts of the body where they are needed. and lack of oxygen to two parts of the body can cause many, many, many of the diseases we know today, including cancer and all kinds of disease.

So I wish you could say that, and I really recommend highly that each of you see the full video, it's called take back your power and award winning documentary very powerful.

You'll learn a lot to make any decision about smart meters.

You're probably thinking from the people like me who are calling in.

We were either a bunch of nuts, which were not, or that maybe we have something here that maybe there is some danger about the smart meters. But that

but that the technology rollout is inevitable, the smart grid and all of technology, there's nothing we can do. And what I say to that of three words. No, no, no.

myself, I'm big into technology, as are most of us. But the inevitability of technology. Well, I think technology itself is inevitable. technology needs to be safe. And an unsafe technologies have to be stopped at any cost. I think the cities of Longmont and Loveland absolutely heroic, in their their willingness to take on a fiber optic network, which only a handful of municipalities around the country have had the guts to do, that you are providing leadership in that way. And I urge you city of Long month to continue that leadership. Don't accept anything but smart technologies. It's going to take cities like you as an individual to stand up and say, No, we're going to demand safe technology, or we're just not going to accept it. Thank you. Thank you, sir.

Yes, sir. I watched that video this afternoon. And I have a couple of questions about the sampling process used. First of all, how does your chiropractor account for the fact that he had three subjects and three distinct and different forms of cell deterioration observed?

Well,

I don't know how good I can. I'm not a scientist or I'm not a doctor. I think it's pretty common knowledge that the human body everybody reacts differently to all kinds of stimulus. So

the fact that there would be some slight differences, and yes, I'm looking at them, too. In fact, you saw the third subject couldn't even only lasted 45 seconds and then got a blinding headache. But I think it's natural that different subjects just just present differently and that trying to get uniformity is probably never going to happen. If you're trying to prove something. That's the best I can say.

Do you happen to know whether the blood samples were drawn before and after blood samples were drawn from the same site?

The same location? Yes. I my understanding of what I when I saw on that video was it was all done at the

Same time and in the same location.

Okay, so you have not read the backing paper? I have not read the backing paper. No. Okay. Um, oh, I'll read the backing paper. So I can't talk further right now. But I'll make it my business to do so, as well. I

All right, thank you. All right. Next caller. We have what two more? I believe so. Yes. So this would be caller 126? caller 126, you should be able to unmute yourself.

Color ending in one to six. It's star six to unmute yourself.

Hello, can you hear me, we can go ahead and state your name and address for the record. And then you have five minutes.

Excellent. Hello, my name is Vanessa jovic. I live at three, two Baker Street. Thanks so much to the mayor and council for being here. So late tonight.

I'm calling to express my concern about the Atwood residential project that's proposed at 300 outward.

As my neighbor already expressed, there are definitely concerns in the neighborhood with parking and just an overflow of people.

The way that the proposal reads currently states that there's supposed to be 64 additional units, which would roughly double the density if not quadruple, I mean, it kind of I don't know exactly how many people live on this block. But I can kind of get

the existing square block which is substantial, particularly in a historic neighborhood that just doesn't have sufficient parking as it is. Most of the homes here don't have driveways don't have garages. We all rely on street parking and are already navigating and negotiating that. Now I understand that there is

supposedly going to be a a deed restriction in place to limit one vehicle per

per residence. And I guess I'm curious as to how you know how that would be enforced after these units are sold off.

And in the event that someone who owned a unit chose to purchase another vehicle or had a housemate or partner who had an additional vehicle, so that seems to be a little bit of a loose thread to me.

So I was also concerned about sufficient recreation areas for residents and the development of their children and pets this proposed the proposed development is going to have would happen like, right on the train tracks, and then alley and Third Avenue. So there's, you know, when you look at the proposal, there's just not a lot of space there. This is 64 residences that are supposed to go in.

I already mentioned the dramatic population increase.

And then just reliable and safe street after the proposed development in terms of there's like a one way alley

of growth, you know, outward, which is cut down the middle by a train, and then a four lane road on third. So I'm just curious as to how these folks would have sufficient access to their building, in addition to the safety concerns that another Eastside residents already shared this evening around the proposed blockages of either the Fourth Avenue at at one East West

access or Fifth Avenue. So there's just a lot of issues with this whole proposal. What I've been told by planning is that because this is an affordable housing proposal, there's actually no way for us to even comment on it, which is why we're all calling you. So I'm also just kind of, on another level deeply concerned with that part of the process. Now, of course, we all understand is affordable housing, we absolutely support that. It's just the size. And the scope of this seems to be unsustainable to me, as someone who lives here, and I'm concerned that there are like builders and developers who are financially incentivized to build these buildings. And yeah, I'm sure they're great, great folks, and they want to, you know, promote the city's envision plan. And at the same time, these processes, effectively disenfranchising the people who actually live here and have a real stake in the community. So I wanted to share that with you. And I'm open to talking more, if you have any questions

or comments for me.

Thanks for listening. Thank you very much.

All right, last caller.

All right, our last caller is back to eight to nine. We are back to caller eight to nine. Are you able to unmute yourself? star six to unmute.

Call her eight to nine.

All right, well, I've just prompted them to unmute from our admin panel here.

And it looks like they just, it looks like they just hung up. So that is all of our callers.

We've all had a chance to see things tonight. Do we have any Mayor council comments?

Dr. Walters quick question. Eugene, are you still on the line?

still here? Um, with the comments we heard tonight about I mean, everybody's concerned about the flares and the

the spike in in contaminants in the year? What what are our parameters in terms of our legal parameters for dealing with the causes the perpetrators that's coming from, I assume, Wells east of us, but not necessarily could come from a variety of directions? What are our options with respect to

holding them accountable?

Currently now, we have limited regulations, I think, on the air quality.

We were just starting conversations with staff to look at potential regulations. I have to say that that project hasn't been at the top of our list, but we can certainly move it up. I think we can present information on February 9, and get direction from council at that time. Do we have are there some legal options that we have for

operators that that are are flaring, but exempt, but they're doing it outside of our city limits?

You know, currently, I think the CO GCC is the primary regulatory agency. I didn't realize these were outside the city boundaries. So

we don't have any of that going on inside the city limits, do we?

We do have some active wells. I'm not sure exactly where the source of the

emissions were.

But most of them are outside the city. So we would have limited regulatory authority over operations outside the city limits. All right. Well, I'll wait for the presentation. My that's I just didn't you know, I didn't know what how how aggressively we should be thinking about legal options if they made that maybe there are there alternatives, other alternatives other than legal options?

That's where Christiansen

as a follow up to Dr. Waters.

to Eugene, isn't what when we reported this as

deal router maker said we've reported this, and we have not heard back from them. Are they not required to get back to us? I mean, within a certain amount of time.

We have in my office has not looked into this. As you know, in terms of division, this seems to be an operational issue for the city. And there are city staff. We had not been asked

to look at requirements on reporting. We were happy to do that if that's a concern of staff or councils, but we just haven't done that today.

concern.

Yeah, we'll go with Aaron. Mayor Pro Tem you haven't said much tonight. Go ahead.

Thank you, Mary Bagley. Sorry, I would not unmute for some reason. Anyway.

First of all, I just want to thank everybody that called in tonight for all of your opinions and information that I think will to some extent will shape

the rest of the agenda for I would say that this council before the upcoming elections happened in November. I do want to say the one thing that struck me about some of the correspondence I received as well as some of the calls related to the statement that the council decided to endorse unanimously tonight, that a lot of it was solely focused on a concept that we were rebuking

President Trump, I do not believe, you know, I believe there's a portion of the statement that deals with the capital rights. But I felt like the overarching message in the statement was about the need for civility. When we speak to others that do not agree with us ideologically, I thought that was a very important piece of the statement and why I definitely agreed to it. Because I don't think we're necessarily going to get to a point where we're going to absolutely agree with each other. But I hope we get to the point where we can stop calling each other names, and maybe on certain cases agree to disagree, but at the same time, be able to have that civil discussion and also live with each other as our neighbors here in the city of Longmont. And I felt that was more important in the message that that Dr. Waters helped author or authored and that the council agreed with, and I just would hope that people will take a deeper delve into reading that text to see that it is not specifically, in my opinion, a review of the administration, more so as a call to civility, and being neighbors and knowing that we're fellow Americans, and that we all want what's best, even if we don't agree at what's best and getting there. So I just would suggest that folks take a look at that statement a little more closely and not just read what's in the newspapers about it.

Outside of that, it was an interesting public forum compared to, you know, in person when I hope we get to in person, public forums against him, I'm not confident we'll do that in June or July, as we heard, there's some delay in the vaccine distribution earlier on today, or this evening, as well as knowing that the state's doing a great job all things considered with their with what they have available to them. As such a de que again, to everyone that called in tonight. And also thanks to the council members for all your work, even if I disagree with you sometimes. So.

All right. Thank you, Councillor Martin.

Thank you, Mayor Bagley. I'm agreeing with the mayor Pro Tem about finding everything that's important in the in that statement.

I think it was quite profound. And and while I don't know how anyone would fail to rebuke the president personally, that wasn't the big deal. You know, the big deal is that we have a country to hold together, we have a country to put back together. And, you know, I think that should be something that we all can agree on.

But getting back down to specifics of of the oil and gas event that we're all concerned about right now, you know, we spent a fair amount of money

on on Dr. helmig, monitoring technology. And yeah, we you know, have a website that we can and can look at and see what's going on. And that's all great. And I advocate for that. And I think that, you know, we're

cities all up and down the Front Range are trying to emulate that some already have, and it's a good thing. But the great thing will be when we use that data to stop things like this from happening. The CEO gc c and the Air Quality

Commission, yeah. Not a good acronym, woman. But anyway, them those people that are following the new rules that are being slowly squeezed out of the CO GCC

have a rulemaking about something called cumulative effects. And it is supposed to provide the mechanism for an impacted

government

to reach out to something nuts or to cause the state to

enforce the rules against an emitter that is not

in the local governments jurisdiction. I am not clear because again, it's been coming out slowly. And it's kind of not my job to follow them step by step. But at some point, we will have a cumulative effects ruling that we should be able to use to take action based on the data that we're collecting. So, I mean, I think what I want to say is that it definitely should be on both our legal and operational radar screens. And if we need a Council resolution about that to be in effect now then I'm pretty sure that we can arrange that coming up real

Soon, because it's not going to be immediate work that anybody has to do. It's just

adding that to our radar screen.

And I know we already have a very talented young engineer who is doing the monitoring, and we'll know just what to do. We just need to make sure it's our job.

Alright, Counselor pack.

Thank you, man. Frankly, I just I want to thank the public for all of their input all their questions, and contributing to to our democracy. Because this is the most fun part of being on the council, as far as I'm concerned, engaging, actually on a on a one on one basis with our with the public and hearing your concerns.

I do think going back to the gas and oil I thank everybody for your comments. I do think that we don't have to wait for a resolution we can we can do things to educate staff, or educate ourselves and staff. As far as looking at what control Do we have over our air quality?

If not the specific operators Is there anything on the books now that we can enforce, or at least bring to the attention of the state legislators. And I don't think that that is Council's job or role, according to my previous conversations with staff to address the state legislature on on gas and oil operations or their effects.

But that is public knowledge. So

the more people become engaged, the more the environmentalist, and the climate control. Organizations become engaged in know what's happening and contact the legislation and co GCC, we can move this further and faster. So, um, that's what I hope that we come to that everybody uses this data, not just the city council's job to use the data. It's out there for everybody. So I thank you that for that. I also unless someone else on this council, I wanted to make just a statement about where we are with RTD. Were you going to say something you're badly or I was going to actually mention it. But you can go ahead if you'd like Councilmember back, I don't you're gonna say, um,

I just want to say that there have been some public comments made by our new executive director at RTD. That basically has put us in as far as the northwest corner, or not just us. But the other four unfinished corridors with fast tracks on the back burner way back on the burner. So I'm incredibly disappointed with those statements. And I did have a meeting yesterday with

the chair of Neda and the mayor of Lewisville and myself to address where, what, what do we want to do with this and we came up with it, I did text me badly about our meeting as well as called Phil Greenwald. Um, we have decided that we are going to demand basically that this these corridors, for all the reasons that had been stated for years are on a priority list to finish. And if not, we want our money back. And we want to get out of the fast tracks plan. And that is where we're going with it. I think more badly, we'll address that as well. But we're bringing it up with Dr. Cox at tomorrow night's meeting at the Neda SPC meeting, Thursday, and then the fold native board meeting next Friday. And I think that the communities will be all in alignment with this. And

I don't expect RTD to do anything because they don't. But we do have another option in putting all of our

support behind Amtrak and Front Range passenger rail with this is an opportunity with with our new president elect, with our governor with

the new transportation funding that is coming out. So that is where the three of us decided that we are going to try to focus our efforts, but but tell RTD we're done. We're done playing games. So I just wanted to put that out there so that it's transparent of what we're working on. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, guys.

repack. So yeah, tomorrow morning at nine o'clock. Ashley, the mayor of Louisville, and I, along with the other mayors of Boulder County will be meeting via zoom for our our mayors and commissioners committee meeting. And the director, Executive Director of RTD will be there. And what I plan on saying is that we have not voted as a council yet. But given the articles that I'm reading, what I personally planned on saying is saying one, if Are you willing to commit immediately to peak rail service, which is what what our position has been? So are you are you a Mia Will you commit immediately to that, and to Will you do something to show progress, I will remind them that this council and the the group sent me down with the mayor of Westminster to talk to BNSF BNSF was more than willing to provide preliminary plans for coming up with a cost estimate which RTD both the RTD board, as of today has not taken advantage of, I don't like having my time wasted. I do not like having my city taken advantage of I do not like this council be ignored.

So if she is unwilling to commit to showing progress on the peak rail, in a fairly short timeframe, my personal position, and I'm going to advocate with this council and the other communities in Boulder County is that we should no longer push for the train, what we should do is start saying if you are no longer going to be providing a train, and we are not participating in a manner as our voters approved, they're not allowed 2004 they are not allowed to just say now we changed our mind the money can be used elsewhere, they're not allowed to say, you know, what will you do participate in the district. So we're gonna keep using No, the 2004 ballot ballot measure which was passed included the Northwest rail. As such, my position is a give us our money back in the event, you don't give us our money back at the very least stop taking out the 40% of the 40% of a penny for the fast tracks, train, let it go. And we will focus on Amtrak and the passenger rail that we're talking about from Pueblo to Cheyenne. And we'll we'll go with that we don't need our TVs fast track. Because as much as I like RTD, buses, trains, etc. Currently, what we're doing is paying for a train we're never going to get. And while I am all for regional transportation worst case scenario, we can do it a lot cheaper, because we are paying a hell of a lot more for our bus service, and especially our train than anyone else in the district. And so I want to hear what she says. And I cannot represent Council. We're not taking a vote. But if I said anything that any council member would say no, Brian, don't.

All right. That's what I thought so. All right, cool. Yes. Councilmember Christiansen

I want to thank Councilwoman Peck and Mayor Bagley for their and also Phil Greenwald, for their work on transportation. I am just

Of course, we're all going to be transferring transitioning to electric vehicles within the next decade. But that isn't nearly enough.

We have to have mass transportation. And

the idea that a transportation district

does not understand or advocate anything for true mass transit rapid mass transit

is incomprehensible to me, it is so ignorant and

backward and we are the people of Longmont have borne the burden of this

being denied

access to better jobs, better transportation. It's it's a very long so yeah. I'm glad you're doing what you're doing. And thank you very much, both of you. Thanks. Thanks, boy. Right, Dr. Waters. I appreciate your leadership, both for both of you on these issues, is all echo what Councilmember Christensen just said, I'm just curious Mayor Bagley, it's one thing

to state your expectation or Councilmember Christian Christians or

jump up, john Peck Councilmember Peck, I'm sorry, it's late.

to line up the municipalities in terms of a position what are our real legal

options.

would it take a class? Well, no class action would take? It's going to take a lawsuit, I would assume. And what kind of advice is anybody giving in terms of prospects of prevailing either in stopping them from taking out the tax or you'd pull it out of the district? Really what we're doing is we'd be asking the directors to send a letter to the legislators legislature saying,

take long run out, take Lewisville out, take them by statute. Yeah. So legislative action. Yeah. So option A, is and it might, it might need to be approved by the voters. But a, Option A is again performed. Option two is get us out of fast tracks. option three is get us out of the district. You know, there has been talk among the other mayors about as well. And then now as far as a lawsuit and forcing them to to stop using our tax dollars. I know Eugene right now he's not on the screen. But he is I know his stomach is nodding. I can make an argument both sides. I'm not an expert. This is I do not I do not practice bus or train law of a train law.

But I imagine that Eugene, will you be? Could you do some preliminary investigation into this? And so we can have actually, Harold? Can we just put this on a future agenda and talk about our options legally, if any differently that might be best that okay, Eugene.

can do mayor, we had direction to take a look at this. I don't know, year and a half ago, we thought that there was a different direction. We did do some initial research, talk to some of the city's Special Counsel, we can dust that off and bring it back. Let's dust it off. Because I think I my gut is that this council wants to do something. So knowing knowing kind of what we think and how we feel, maybe you can bring some some options for us. That'd be okay. And we can talk I saw that your date your your vision gazed off the screen like Oh, crap, maybe we could talk further length, but just just kind of a heads up, let's let's let's put something on the agenda here, when you're within your timeframe, given your workload?

Yeah, so just I'll make one last comment if we're gonna if we're gonna make those utterances. And I think we should, but I'd like to know what we can actually follow through on what those parameters are. So I appreciate this. So if we're going to say it, and people don't respond, then we ought to be able to do what we what we re adjusted, we're going to do, right. So I think that could include outside counsel Eugene, so are you thinking an executive session or a public session? executive session? I think this is this will be legal advice. And if we're serious about this, we need to hear what you have to say. Okay. I think the question I'm, I'm gonna pitch you Eugene's lay is language in the order in the ballot language and what was actually funded to see if there was a difference between what they funded and what was it about

all that stuff. Customer back.

Thank you badly, just just for council to know what what my position is about Longmont and our residents. A city that I think is incredible. And that I love is that, and I don't know the area. I don't know that. But it is the east end of Manhattan that has been paying 100 years for a subway that there's they still don't have.

I don't want to do that to our residents. We shouldn't be paying for something that is nothing more than the piggy bank for the Southern District to operate their rail.

But what might be a good thing to look at? Is that that part of Manhattan, and I don't get the direct the correct wording for you, is suing. So it might be good to look at what they're using for their parameters to to sue. I guess it's the MTA

for so just FYI,

if we can get enough people riled up, we can well, we could protest by having everybody go down with a long line ID and just say I'm from Longmont and start packing their trains. pack them until they listen. Alright. But no violence. All right. Nope, no violence. All right. No electoral vote interference. All right. Harold, do you have anything?

counsel, Eugene, anything else? Other than Thanks a lot.

No further comments, Mayor. All right. Motion to adjourn. So moved. I'll second. All in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Opposed. All right. Eyes. Have a good night guys. Talk to you later.