Welcome back to this monthly meeting of the parks Arts and Culture Committee of Denver City Council.

Join us in the Parks Arts and Culture Committee starting now.

Good morning, everyone.

Happy Tuesday.

I'm really excited to be here at Parks Art and Culture Committee talking about our bison transfer.

But before we get started with our great presentation, we'll start with introductions from council members.

We'll start with committee chair, Councilman Heinz to my right.

Vice Chair, you're the chair.

Committee vice chair.

Chris Heinz.

Good morning, Stacey Gilmore, District 11.

Good morning, Manisanne, Northwest Denver District.

One.

Good morning, Darrell Watson.

Fine District 9.

And we have no council member.

Oh, we have one council member online.

Hi.

Thank you for joining us.

Shannon, do you want to introduce yourself and take it away?

We're really excited to hear your presentation.

Absolutely.

Thank you so much for having me this morning, Council members.

My name is Shannon Denison.

I'm the director of Denver Mountain Parks.

We also have our executive director at Denver Parks and Rec Joel and Clark here as well, as well as a few other members of the DPR team.

We also have Lewis Talbull online from Denver Mountain Park staff as well.

Well, I'm very excited to present to you this morning.

You all ready to go?

All right, I will jump right into it then.

This morning we have two items for council consideration.

We have Council Resolution 260398, which is a concessionaire contract at Pahhaska at Lookout Mountain Park, and Council Bill 260422, which is the bison transfer ordinance.

You all can let me know if you want me to take a break to talk about questions for each one, or if you'd like to address them separately.

As I mentioned, uh these are both for the Denver Mountain Parks.

Just a quick refresher.

We're gonna be talking about two specific parks today, uh, or two specific items.

We're gonna be talking about uh bison transfer, which is applicable to Genesee Park and to Daniels Park, uh, as well as Lookout Mountain Park, uh, which is located just west of Golden.

We'll start with Council Resolution 260398 for the concessionaire contract of Pahaska at Lookout Mountain Park.

Uh lookout Mountain Park.

Uh, if you've grew up in Denver, you're probably very familiar with it.

It's uh one of our more popular mountain parks.

It sees about half a million visitors per year.

At the site, we have Buffalo Bill's Grave, the Pahasca Cafe and Gift Shop, and the Buffalo Bill Museum, all uh within a central complex.

Uh the building, the uh concession building dates back to 1921 and was operated by a concessionaire through the end of 2024.

The Buffalo Bill Museum was constructed in 1977 and is entirely operated by City and County of Denver staff.

And over the last several years, it's been a key opportunity to reimagine the space to advance the uh game plan for a healthy city.

There's a significant need for transformation at Lookout Mountain Park.

Uh currently we have aging infrastructure, uh, underutilization of the site, underrepresented history and culture, lack of revenue diversity, and limited operations space, and we'd really like to move this in a different direction and achieve a future condition of having historic inviting mountain charm, daytime and evening activation, improved reflection of native history, a new event facility and transportation someday, um, and uh someday a new facility for public and staff.

Uh but at this point in time, this is really the first step in that direction.

I want to share sort of a photo tour of what we're looking at, uh, the historic condition of Pahaska uh from 1921 and the more recent condition.

Uh again, the historic condition, and then the recent condition with the uh last concession era at the site.

You can see that the character and a lot of the uh uh interior of the building is not as visible.

Uh the historic veranda that looked out over the city and county of Denver was enclosed uh probably in the 1950s or so uh and was used for um entertainment machines and retail space.

Uh the uh conditions of the dining room are very different than the original character.

And then uh here's some current conditions in the lobby and retail area.

You can see that the building is is looking a little bit shabby and really needs a lot of investment and love.

Again, we'll just do a visual tour.

Uh this is the dining room and kitchen.

You can see that the floor and ceiling need pretty substantial work.

Uh some general conditions and areas that need repair.