Welcome back to this weekly meeting of the Community Planning and Housing Committee with Denver City Council.

Your community planning and housing committee starts now.

Hello and good afternoon.

Welcome to Community Planning and Housing.

Today is Tuesday, July 14th.

And we have an action item and briefing for today.

Let's go ahead and get started with introductions.

I'm Diana Romero Campbell, and I represent Southeast Denver in District 4, and I will turn right Amanda Sawyer, District 5.

Jamie Torres, West Denver District 3.

Wonderful.

And we'll go ahead and start with our first action item.

And I'll turn it over to you to introduce what we're going to be discussing today.

Thank you, Councilwoman.

David Gaspers, Special Project Supervisor in Community Planning and Development.

And I have in front of you today the ETOD implementation plan from Federal BRT contract.

So this will be a contract we're taking through to council.

I'll give you some overview and background, run through a high level review of the scope and try to answer any questions for you.

We have tried to brief as many council members as before this meeting, so hopefully many of you are aware of at least some elements of what I'll go over.

All right, so the project overview we are focused on Federal Boulevard to the extents of the city, both south and north, so the entire bit of federal within Denver and the half mile buffer on either side of the boulevard.

This is an FTA grant award of two million dollars.

We actually applied for this grant back in 2024, very slow moving through the federal process, but we did receive the award uh last year, and it is a part of their pilot program for transit oriented development.

This is actually the same program that we received funding to do the uh East and E Central uh NPI plans all on Colfax.

Um now already I don't know, five, six years ago.

I feel like it wasn't a lot way longer than what it probably is, but um so very excited to go back to that funding source.

Uh and obviously they saw that as a success success at the FTA.

Uh the award includes a three-year limited time employee.

Uh, that will be Josh Paul Mary, who's someone we were able to bring back through uh our layoffs, actually, through this for a three year stint as a senior city planner.

Um we are not a direct recipient of FTA funds, so RTD is serving as the pass through.

Uh so we have an IGA in place with them.

Project schedule.

Uh, hopefully, we would be working with our consultants starting this September for approximately 18 months, and then uh Josh would actually continue on beyond those 18 months to actually deliver a regulatory package.

So, this is not an adopted plan, uh, but it would uh likely result in either uh a text amendment or map amendment that would help implement some of the findings of the plan.

We've selected HNTB through a very competitive uh procurement process.

I think we had six or seven really great submittals and H and DB did a great job of combining both their national expertise on equitable TOD with a local team for a lot of knowledge uh for the corridor.

Uh so Diane Gormley Barnes will be their project manager, uh, but we um have that paired to a lot of local knowledge uh with like Beth Bogle Sang, who has worked on many of the MPI plans and will be working on far northwest as we do this plan, uh, as well as Arlingtanawaki, who has uh great knowledge of uh the Federal Boulevard Corridor from an economic standpoint.

So we think it's a really great team.

I'd also highlight that um for the regulatory work they actually hired Deirdre O's, a former CPD employee who now works at Foster Dram, Millsteen Calcher.

So really in-depth knowledge or zoning code is an important part of why we chose this team because we felt they really would know how to help us advance equitable TOD.

And you might be saying, what is equitable TOD?

Well, I uh I've been fortunate enough to work in TOD here in Denver for about 15 years at least now.

And um, and I've been able to talk to a lot of other communities that uh do transit-oriented development.

Uh a couple cities in particular have been leading with equitable TOD, Chicago and Austin.

We've actually worked with them closely and they've learned a lot from us, and we're learning a lot from them.

Uh we did it a little bit differently, right?

We had a TOD plan first.

We started to integrate equity into the Blueprint Denver uh concepts, and now we've actually been applying equitable development since Blueprint Denver uh across all the city.

If we take federal, for example, it could be $300 million of federal and and local funds through CDOT.

How do we actually make sure that the improvement to the transit corridor actually serves the people that are already there, right?

That actually have been riding the bus today on federal.

And so we want to make sure to not just uh do traditional TOD but really put those equitable outcomes in front and make sure that we are removing barriers that we may have in place to achieve those goals.

Very uh small schedule there.

Uh that most important thing out of this is that of all the tasks, we want to achieve it in a relatively quick manner, 18 months with the consultant team, and then Josh would be able to take over from there and deliver that regulatory package afterwards.

So not only do we do the work, but we actually have uh staff time to uh put things on the books, if you will.

Scope items here, uh we have this ETOD policy and strategy component, uh, opportunity site planning, where we would actually look at very specific sites along the corridor, both small and large, and actually uh run it through a uh site master plan process and then infrastructure planning.

Really looking at the small area plans that we have, right?

There's already five of the six MPI plans uh completed.

We're working on the sixth one.

Uh we're not creating new adopted policies here.

We're trying to take the adopted policies that we've already gone through with those planning efforts and actually implement them.

So that's the intent of this effort.