Hey Denver.

It's time for this biweekly meeting of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee of Denver City Council.

Join us for the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee starting now.

All right, welcome to the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

Today is July 15th, and I am Chantel Lewis, and I chair this committee.

It's actually the last day that I am chairing this committee and the festivities.

And with that, I'm going to take a moment of personal privilege.

For those of you watching at home, there is a council election next week, and after that, committee is it's committee assignments will move around.

As such, this May, this is actually the last meeting of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee that I am chairing.

It has been an absolute pleasure and honor to chair this committee and to serve in this role.

I want to thank Alyssa for the work that she's done as well as Melissa for the work that you all have done to support in staffing this committee, the agency staff who meet regularly regularly with me in my office, notably Rita and Kevin before he left Den, as well as Elena and Maggie of Dottie.

Thank you for the work in partnership that you have done.

And I also wanted to thank Council President Sandoval who made the move to make me the chair of this committee in what was the business committee all the way back in the late summer of 2024.

Like I said, it has been an absolute honor and a privilege, and I look forward to the person who chairs this committee the next go-round.

With that, we can do a round of introductions, and I'll start with you, Councilman Hines.

Chris Hines, Denver's Perfect.

Kevin Flynn, South West Denver's District 2.

Thank you.

And then we can go online.

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

And I just also want to echo what a tremendous job you have done as a chair of this committee.

And lovely as always with your celebration on.

I live in Vedic.

I love it.

Thank you so much.

We have one briefing with Dottie presenting on the safe routes to school in Denver Moves Everyone.

Before we get to that, I'd like to turn the floor over to Councilwoman Alvidres.

Thank you so much, uh committee chair.

I just wanted to take a moment to talk about how we got to this place.

Um today we were supposed to be presenting on next steps, have ballot language ready for a seat tax to provide permanent funding for safe routes to school and Denver moves everyone.

And um we really, you know, in respect to my colleagues who I just have seen, even for example, with the municipal sentencing, the amount of work that you need to go to and outreach and stakeholdering and a coalition building that needs to be done.

Um wasn't quite there, and there was some tangible things that were also missing, which was we needed to have projections specifically for ballot language and ballot language ready pretty much by today in order to make the ballot.

And so uh what I want to say is that's not off the table.

We're still eager to look for funding sources.

But I thought this was a great opportunity and ask Dottie to help us illustrate the need.

Um and I think that was one of the biggest things to me is that there it there is a dollar amount, right?

That we need to actually make these programs work and talk about how much what the dollars are that we have today, what our goals are and um what all of that looks like and how we can work in partnership.

And my goal at the end of this is that we can find ways to work together and bring coalition together with all these other groups um that care about this issue, including people that are upset right now about the 16th Street Mall, right?

Or 16th Street.

I don't know what it's called anymore, but the actual bus won't be uh running there anymore.

So I look forward to working together to find solutions by I think highlighting what the need is and what we're trying to fund is great.

So thank you to director for your entire team for putting together this uh slideshow in a short amount of time to help get us to that point.

I think there'll be many follow-up conversations to this.

So I just wanted to be able to say that.

But with that, I'll with your permission, I'll just thank you.

Actually, let me welcome Councilman Cashman, of course, to the meeting, and then you can do your introductions and get into the community.

Um I'm Amy Ford, I'm the executive director of Denver's Department of Transportation Infrastructure, joined by Jen and Riley.

I'll let them introduce myself.

Yes, good afternoon, Jen Hillhouse.

I'm the Director of Transportation Mobility Planning for Dottie.

Good afternoon.

I'm Riley Lemie, I'm a principal city planner with Dottie.

And uh to Councilwoman Alvedros's thank you for the opportunity to sit and talk today.

Um I think this is the start to the conversation rather than the end, and I think there's a lot more definition and thoughtful uh you know execution about how we talk about money and funding, transportation goals and priorities.

So today Riley and Jen are going to walk you through Denver Moves Everyone, which as you know is sort of our North Star substantive process that was completed, engaged with the public back in 2022 to set the vision and the goals for transportation and what we want to accomplish in the kind of city that we want to live in for mobility, sustainability, for mode shift, for you know, for safety.

And part of that came with not just a definition of a variety of different programs and others, but also with a definition and estimate of what does it cost to achieve our goals of zero fatalities on Denver streets or to achieve our goals of mode shift or to achieve our goals of how we think about a sustainable transportation system.

And so we're going to talk about that at the high level today we're also going to then give you a look ahead at where we have gotten our dollars in the past how much historically we have gotten from different sources and I think that's an important piece transportation is not just funded by local dollars it is funded by federal dollars and grants it is also equally funded by different fees and enterprises.

So we're going to talk through that basically and I'll probably take those slides if you guys don't mind.

And then we'll turn around and talk to you about the individual programs that we have especially those you have questions about like safe rights to schools as well as Vision Euro, which are less plans per se, but then as much initiatives that are funded and resourced and programmed through our existing DME different initiatives with signals and transit and pedestrian crossings and others.

So we look forward to the start of this conversation I'll turn it over to the team so they can get going and then we'll please interrupt us as usual some of this might be repetitive you know it and so feel free to tell us to hustle up if you already know some of these things and we can get to the meat of the conversation.