Welcome back to this biweekly meeting of the budget and policy committee of Denver City Council.

Join us for the discussion.

As the budget and policy committee starts now.

Joining the case.

All right.

Thank you for joining us on this amazing hot July 13th day for the Denver Budget, City Council Budget and Policy Amanda Sandball, Northwest Denver District 1.

Do we have let's get started with our colleagues on Zoom and then we'll go around the room.

Hi, good afternoon.

Diana Romero Campbell, Southeast Denver, District 4.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And then I'll start on my right.

Chris Hines.

Perfect time.

Kevin Flynn, Southwest Denver's District 2.

Amanda Sawyer, District 5.

Jamie Torres, West Denver District 3.

Dara Watson, fine, District 9.

Paul Cashman, South Denver, District 6.

Sonana Gonzalez Cochetas, one of your council members at large.

Thank you all.

So we have the civil service charter changed.

Councilwoman Torres and I have been working on.

And I'm going to pitch over to her at the other end of the table.

And I'll just interject as needed.

But proposed mostly we'll have Councilwoman Torres lead us through the presentation.

Okay, perfect.

Thanks everyone.

And thank you all for those who we've been able to brief beforehand.

This will largely be very familiar.

So Council President Sandoval and I after the passage of the charter change that authorized police and fire to recruit non-citizens.

That passed in November of last year and was implemented.

And we had heard immediately from Gracie that they had received applicants in their police academy recruitment pool who were in that particular category and were excited to process through the application process.

But that opened us up for really this bigger conversation about those two sections of the charter and whether or not they are as up to date as they need to be, as accurate as they need to be, and as contemporary.

So we started looking at the two sections of charter that governs Civil Service Commission and Classified Service.

One of the things that we led with, and Robin is here from the Office of Social Equity and Innovation.

Robin Jones worked with us because she was already working with the Department of Public Safety on applying an equity lens to several different policies that they had.

So she came on and joined us in applying and making sure we were ready to apply an equity lens to this work.

So it started with a workshop and making sure that we knew what that meant, particularly when we gathered all of the stakeholders who would be reviewing this language with us.

Tikis was our original one.

Brian came on as president of the PPA earlier this year.

I thank you.

Updating the charter with gender neutral language, so both sections of this charter would begin to do that for the entire charter, which I hope would be a future body of work.

We are removing another citizenship requirement.

There was a requirement that commissioners for the Civil Service Commission be citizens.

We're striking that.

So other people can apply to serve as commissioners in the future.

We still have the public safety kit up program under the civil service section of the charter.

It is not operationalized there.

It's operated out of the manager of safety section.

And so we're moving that to the actual manager of safety section of the charter, not taking it out, just moving it over to where it belongs.

We did extend a couple timelines for with the time period that the manager of safety has to assess and review disciplinary recommendations and suspension pending investigation.

Those were increased by maybe 10 days depending on which one of those.

And at the request of the manager of safety.

So those seemed easy and meaningful to update.

One of the things that the chief asked us to take a look at in particular was allowing folks who are on probationary period to have that period extended for special circumstances of leave, approved leave, like they've been called to military, they might be out for pregnancy or medical leave, that they can come back and still finish out their probationary period without having to start from the very beginning again.

And then we added two sections modification in what were what are caps or limitations on how big the command staff for both the police and the fire department can get.

The request from those chiefs was that we eliminate the caps.

We became fine with that, particularly because any future staffing increases are also a budget conversation.

It's not just an internal discussion that they increase or decrease command staff.