Governance and Intergovernmental Relations Committee of Denver City Council.

Thanks for joining us for the discussion.

The governance and intergovernmental relations committee starts now.

Tuesday, March 17th.

I'm wearing my green for St.

Patrick's Day.

I might be the only council member wearing green.

Oh, hey!

No, I take that back.

Sand of hello from Mario Campbell, good job.

Um this is the our monthly governance committee.

Um I'm Amanda Sawyer.

I have the honor of representing the residents of District 5 and chairing this committee.

Uh we have a lot to do today.

Uh first we'll start with an action item and then our state legislative briefing.

Um before we get started, why don't we do a round of introductions?

And I'm going to start to my lift.

Hi, everybody.

Serena Gonzalez Cuchetas, one of your council members at large.

Good morning, Darrell Watson, flying district nine.

Uh good morning, Paul Cashman, South Denver District 6, and I'm green with envy.

Uh good morning, uh Kevin Flynn, Southwest Denver District 2.

I'm Irish, and I'm not wearing Grand Award yesterday, and so somebody on the street as I came in said uh told me Pog Mahom.

So I have to have to look that up and see what that means.

Good morning, Amanda Sandoval, Northwest Emory District 1.

Good morning, Diana Romero Campbell, Southeast Denver, District 4.

Morning, Chantal Louis, District 8.

All right, fantastic.

Well, we'll start with our action item first.

Um this is actually two action items that are gonna go in a block 327 and 329.

Council members, why don't you take it away?

Uh thank you, madam chair.

Um this is something that uh I think has been wanting to happen for a long time, and it came to a head uh with a couple of actions uh in the last year or so, uh, particularly the the women's soccer stadium.

And uh under 3.2.6 in the charter, we review and vote on contracts, leases, and certain other instruments.

And typically, because we have 30 days to review them, we haven't received the actual documents until the Thursday filing for the Monday action.

And so this is these these are two changes.

One to the uh revised municipal code to specify in the code when that 30 days starts, which is always been agreed on that it starts the Thursday filing for Monday.

Uh but then a rules of procedure change to require that we actually have the contracts or drafts of the contracts available to members at the time of the committee meetings where they'll be approved to the floor.

And so uh we are sponsoring this together.

Uh there's council president Sandoval, uh, Councilwoman McParity, who is not available today, uh, and and I so uh I I well I just said that.

Should have changed the slide.

Uh under current practice, we don't receive them until the Thursday afternoon.

I can't speak for other members, but I assume it's the same.

But I spend most of my weekends uh not out having fun and recreating, but reading contracts and other other things.

And some weeks are uh tougher than others.

We uh in one week in December we had 27 contracts in one meeting.

Uh that uh most of which we didn't have much time to review.

Um so in 2015, uh the council we used to have extra time.

Uh it we used to approve all these things through a council bill, two-reading bill.

And in 2015, before the class of 2015, of which Councilman Cashman and and uh currently Councilwoman Gilmore and I were part.

Uh prior to us taking office, that council changed that to a uh one-reading resolution, uh, which left uh only four days to review contracts.

Uh we did add rule 3.6 that allowed us to postpone one if we needed more time.

So the proposal here is that we clarify the 30-day shot clock uh starts with the noon Thursday filing for Monday's legislative meeting, and then we uh amend our rules of procedure to specify the contracts and other items uh that are scheduled for committee action or consent uh must be accompanied by the current draft of the contract or other documents by the time of the committee meeting.

Uh the council president and by delegation, the chairs of committees have the discretion to uh waive this requirement.

And we did uh talk with we met with the mayor's office, it says in the presentation that it may be waived, it will cause unnecessary delay.

We've agreed to remove that and and basically grant discretion for other reasons.

It doesn't necessarily have to be an unnecessary delay, but there might be another good reason to waive the uh uh to waive the requirement at the time of committee.

Uh certainly uh we would have it, we would have the the the instruments before we vote on them regardless.

Uh uh we went over this in budget and policy.

I don't know how much more uh detail we can add to it, but uh uh there was some ambiguity in the way the charter amendment was passed in 1982 that says that the 30-day review period starts when the item is submitted for council's approval, and nowhere else in the charter is the word submitted used, so we don't know what that exactly means.