Welcome back to this biweekly meeting of the South Platte River Committee of Denver City Council.

Join us for the discussion as the South Platte River Committee starts now.

Welcome everyone.

There we go.

Welcome everyone.

Thanks for joining us.

This is the South Platte Corridor Committee.

There we go.

There we go.

On August 27th.

Thank you for joining us.

Before we uh welcome our presentation guests, let's do a round of introductions.

I'll start with myself.

Councilwoman Torres, I represent West Denver District 3.

It's perfect.

What I mean, but that's lucky district seven.

Darrell Watson, finding District 9.

Excellent.

Thank you all so much.

And to our guests, go ahead and introduce yourselves and go ahead and get started.

Thank you so much.

I'm Ryan Aids.

I'm the executive director for the Greenway Foundation.

I'm Becky Harkins.

I'm the education director of the Greenway Foundation.

We have a couple of our other staff members here for support in the crowd with us as well.

So we'll introduce them maybe at the end.

But thanks for having us here today.

We've been looking forward to this presentation for a while now.

And I just want to start by saying thank you for having this committee.

As the Greenway Foundation, it's a dream come true to have a committee dedicated to the South Platte River.

So thank you guys for the work that you're doing, keeping it a priority for the city.

And it means a lot to us.

So thank you.

Thanks for having us.

Today we plan to just give you a little bit of history on the Greenway Foundation, a little bit of our background, kind of current events, what we've been up to, what we're working on.

And our goal is today that we all leave here.

You guys know what we're all about and what we do.

Okay.

So last year we celebrated our 50th anniversary, and as part of our 50th anniversary celebration, we embarked on a strategic planning effort with our board and our staff.

Out of that strategic planning effort, we came out with an updated mission and vision statement that you can see on the screen there, and an updated tagline that really just we tried to distill everything that we do and everything that we're about into one tagline, and we felt like we did that with a cleaner, safer, more accessible river for all.

And we really stress the for all piece of that tagline.

An additional part of the strategic planning effort were three pillars that we decided we wanted our work to focus on.

And those three pillars were community engagement, education, and stewardship.

And we'll talk in depth about each of those.

Before we go into the three pillars, I did want to share an updated an updated return on investment study that we recently completed.

So this study was completed by an independent third-party consultant, Summit Economics.

It's an updated version of a study that we originally completed in 2017.

And we updated this to be reflective of values through 2024.

What you see on the screen there is the whole report distilled down into a one-pager, trying to get the highlights out of that.

And there's a couple of things that I wanted to highlight out of that for you guys today.

One being the study area for the return on investment study was residential parcels within a half a mile out of the river all the way through Denver.

And in 1974, when the work of the Greenway Foundation started, properties that were within that boundary were worth 45% less than values out or than properties outside of that boundary.

And today they're worth 84% higher on average.

It just shows what it means when you invest in a river, in tangible benefits.

Numbers to that, it it equates to an additional 61.3 million dollars annually, an additional property tax, an additional 40 and a half million dollars to Denver Public Schools based on the investment that's been done in that river in the river.

I bring that up at the beginning because projects that invest in the quality and the health of our river are the right thing to do morally and environmentally, but this shows that it's also the right thing to do economically.

And right now we have an opportunity with our partnership with U.S.

Army Corps of Engineers and the Waterway Resiliency Program to invest in our river in a way that we've never done before.

That represents the largest single investment in the South Platte River in Denver's history.