Welcome back to this monthly meeting of the Governance and Intergovernmental Relations Committee of Denver City Council.

Thanks for joining us for the discussion.

The governance and intergovernmental relations committee starts now.

All right, good morning, everyone.

It is Tuesday, July 21st.

This is the governance committee.

I'm Amanda Sawyer.

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

We have an action item and a briefing today.

So before we get started, why don't we do a round of introductions and I'm gonna start to my left.

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

Jamie Torres, West Denver District 3.

Good morning, Amanda Sambo, Northwest Denver District 1.

Hi everybody, Sedana Gonzalez Kennis, one of your council members at large.

Kevin Flynn, Southwest Denver's District 2.

Alright, fantastic.

And just checking to make sure we don't have anyone online.

We do not.

Okay, so we are gonna start with 1048 and 1055, which is gonna be a block vote.

And our presenters today are gonna be uh council members Torres and Sandoval.

It's very weird not to call you Council President Sandoval.

Um so why don't you guys take it away?

Thank you so much.

Um we are uh bringing um this proposal for a ballot measure to change the charter.

Um since we came to budget and policy uh a couple weeks ago, we have also drafted a companion ordinance um uh per the good recommendation, Councilwoman Sawyer in our conversation to accompany this.

We're aiming to do it later, no time like the present to make sure all questions get answered.

So um uh Councilwoman Sandoval and I are pleased to bring uh this particular um charter change forward um and ask for your support.

Um I will uh go through our entire kind of process.

We started um nearly a year ago, and uh in our meeting with the Office of Social Equity and Innovation, uh, we knew that we had really wanted to orient this review of these of two charter sections um leaning in with an equity lens.

And so we partnered with OSCI, Robin Jones in particular, who had already been working with public safety departments applying equity lens to their policies, um and she agreed to work with us, which included pulling a group of stakeholders together who would be workshopping this two sections of language, um, and starting first with a training about how you apply how you create and apply an equity lens.

So um many thanks to Robin for her help in um really kind of creating that foundation for us with this.

Um these this was our workshop uh team of stakeholders, um, and all of the folks that uh we knew would have uh a stake in this conversation.

Uh Dumble Denver Civil Service Commission Director Gracie Perez.

Umrigally Civil Service Commissioner, Al Gardner was participating.

He became Department of Safety Executive Director and continued to participate in that capacity.

Um Office of the Independent Monitor, the monitor Liz Castle was a part of our uh group, uh Robin from OSCI, the two chiefs from fire and police, Chief Fulton and Chief Thomas, and then representatives from the two safety unions, uh Chris Ferguson from Local 858 uh Firefighters Union, and uh Brian from uh Brian Pasalko, um, president of the PPA.

Um, we did have the prior PPA president originally involved, is currently Brian and um uh additional folks from the PPA.

Um so we were looking exclusively at section 9.3 and 9.4 of the charter that governed civil service and classified service.

And if you'll remember, this was really prompted by our um prior charter change removing citizenship from the recruitment requirement for police and fire.

Um we recognized that there were probably other things that just needed to be updated.

There's a lot of out-of-date language in our charter overall and in these sections that we didn't want uh to continue to get in the way of uh really broad and diverse processes that we knew that our safety departments wanted to be able uh to implement.

Um the uh admin details as well that are in the charter.

Um we wanted to potentially move to ordinance where they could be subject to update to uh change to broaden to um constrict as time needs as the conversation needs in the future.

We are not proposing major changes to those uh sections today.

And you'll find that we added two other sections per the request of the two chiefs of police and fire.

So with regard to 9.3 and 9.4, we are moving language that feels very operational and very detailed into ordinance.

To have that kind of detail in charter feels like really confining to have something exist in concrete that cannot be changed other than with a vote to the people.

So we wanted to make sure that that had some flexibility, but there's still legislative and decision making process around those pieces of language, even when they're in ordinance as well as rulemaking for civil service.

We are removing the citizenship requirement that remains in the charter for civil service commissioners.

That was one that we had not removed before that we are uh taking out of it this time.

Um the public safety cadet program is listed as a in the civil service section, even though civil service has nothing to do with the cadet program, and we would just like to move that to the appropriate section of the charter.

Um we are offering to extend some timelines that the manager of safety has to review disciplinary recommendations or suspension uh pending investigation recommendations, and those are just being extended by um a handful of days per their request.

Um this one was another one that we found very interesting once we got into the details, allowing probationary periods to be extended in the cases of approved leave.

So that's like military leave, medical leave, allowing probate uh probationary um firefighters and police officers to extend that period so they don't have to start back over once that leave ends.

Um and then at the request of the two chiefs, um removing the command staff caps um felt like an appropriate thing to do, um, knowing that we also have backstops during the um budgeting process for how many FTEs they have, um, how much budget they might need to allocate to new ones.

This is the proposed ballot question.

Uh we tried to keep it um very simple, very clear as to what we were doing.

And the companion ordinance.

So this is new since budget and policy.

Um we want this to accompany the charter amendment moving forward, and we wanted to make very clear um the what was going to be in the companion ordinance.