Welcome back to this weekly meeting of the Health and Safety Committee with Denver City Council.

Coverage of the Health and Safety Committee starts now.

Good morning.

This is Wednesday, August 6th, the Health and Safety Committee.

My name is Darrell Watson.

I'm honored to be the uh chair of this committee, and I'm honored to serve all residents of the flying district nine.

Uh we have one action item and four consent items.

But before we join, uh begin our presentations.

Uh we'll do brief introductions of council members.

Why don't we start from our right with Council President Pro Teton?

Good morning.

Diana Romero Campbell, Southeast Denver, District 4.

Morning.

I'll leave off the good.

Uh Kevin Gwynn, Southwest Denver's District 2.

Uh hi, everyone.

Sadana Gonzalez Gutierrez, one of your council members at large.

Hi, Amanda Sawyer, District 5.

Jamie Torres, West Denver District 3.

Good morning, uh Stacy Gilmore, District 11.

Good morning, Amanda Sanible, Northwestern District 10.

Sarah Cody, your other council member at large.

When does the S, Flora Libres from Lucky District 7?

Welcome everyone to our our safety meeting.

We have one action item, and it's a uh presentation action um uh action item 25117, an ordinance concerning the disclosure of non-monetary settlements.

And I turn it over to Councilmember uh Torres and Councilmember Gilmore.

Thank you, Mr.

Chair.

Um thank you so much, uh Council members.

It's um uh Councilmember Gilmore and I are really glad to get this over the line.

It's uh a small but really important uh modification to uh the um municipal code.

Um and so what it ultimately does is ensure transparency in all of our public safety settlement agreements.

Um this is kind of what we're gonna go over today, and want to start off with um some uh ground setting, I think, from uh Julia Richmond who chairs the Citizen Oversight Board.

Um, and to ensure lasting transparency and community trust, the Citizen Oversight Board recommends the disclosure of non-monetary settlement obligations, be established in a formal policy and potentially in an ordinance.

So this was part of a letter that we received in 2024.

It was the second letter from the Citizen Oversight Board uh to leadership at the time, which um I was president at the at the time of the first letter.

Um now President Sandoval was president at the time of the second letter, and we um definitely needed to figure out how what is the problem and how do we try to resolve it.

And so Councilmember Gilmore and I were asked uh to dig in and try to figure out what needed to be done on this.

Um a little bit of the background um uh from the letters.

Um the COB uh reviewed nearly uh over a hundred and fifty settlement agreements uh because they were not sure that they were seeing all of the agreement uh indicators or um settlements um that were not kind of the monetary disclosure.

Uh so those could be training, um, those could be um something additional.

Um I've been a part of some settlement agreements that required a community meeting be arranged uh for uh community partners.

Some of those were not always uh shared with uh the monitor of the citizen oversight board.

In fact, in four um uh major cases, um those non-monetary settlements were not disclosed, so that the Citizen Oversight Board and the Office of the Independent Monitor could make sure that they were tracking everything that the city agreed to do and in fact were able to carry out in doing.

Um and they found that there was no requirement for the public disclosure of those items, and so that was what prompted them to uh email Denver City Council.

Um so the recommendation uh from the COB was um we need to establish a formal policy.

Um we need to make sure that uh a key partner, whether it was the city attorney or the clerk and recorder, trigger some way to communicate those non-monetary settlements uh to uh COB and the OIM in the future.

Codify that and so they can ensure the oversight and accountability through their independent review.

Um so we made um a couple small changes um to the uh section that speaks to records, access to records by the Office of the Independent Monitor.

Um so this is the new section 2-390.

Um it requires full cooperation from our safety departments, um Department of Safety, Police, Sheriff, and Fire mandates written explanations for delays or denials.

It allows the monitor's office to participate in policy development and requires proactive notification of policy and practice changes.

So the new disclosure requirements ask for within 30 days of that final settlement or or 30 days of council approval, the city attorney would forward the full agreement to the monitor's office and the citizen oversight board.

And it applies to two key areas allegations of improper conduct by public safety and agreements that require some kind of departmental action.

What this does not apply to our settlements of discipline or disqualification appeals initiated by uniform personnel that has a separate process.

So three of the four cases that the Citizen Oversight Board looked at and found that they that they did not know that there were non-monetary settlement agreements were these three cases 2018 Michael Marshall, 2014, Jamal Hunter, and 2008, Emily Rice.

That is, of settlement agreements, we get briefings of those, we approve those.

But that somebody out there, especially our Citizen Oversight Board and Independent Monitor, are notified as well and are able to track the progress because we are also not the body to do that.

And we need we want to make sure that there is somebody out there that is.

Obviously, it is it doesn't occur in every case.