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

Join us for the Finance and Business Committee starting now.

It's Tuesday, September 29th, 2026.

You have tuned in to the Finance and Business Committee.

I'm Chris Hines, I serve on Diverse City Council, representing District 10.

The FINBIS agenda has one briefing and three consent items.

So if uh colleagues, if you don't pull those consent items off before the end of the meeting, they will move forward to the full body.

Before we give our briefing, let's uh have a round of introductions.

Do

we have anyone online?

Yes, we do.

Good morning.

Paul Catherine Shout Denver District 6.

Well, hello, distinguished gentlemen from District 6.

Uh anyone else online?

All right.

Uh let's uh start to my left.

Hi, uh Sadana Gonzalez Kuchetis, Councilmember at large.

Uh good morning, Diana Romero Campbell, Southeast Denver, District 4.

Chantel Lewis, District 8.

All right.

Well, um this is uh uh your opportunity to talk about a uh 261424 of Libra Acknowledgement update.

Thank you so much.

You want to introduce yourself?

Uh hi, Jessica Terry, uh senior aid to Councilman Lewis.

And we will get into the slides.

So

good

morning.

So I understand this is a rather unusual posture for an item um to take when it's in committee, but today is a presentation only on the um labor acknowledgement, and I wanted to give you all an update on the conversation that we had with our stakeholders over the past month.

So here is the initial labor acknowledgement that we brought to Finbis in late July.

Um I'm not going to read it because I'm sure you all have seen it.

Um, but this was co-created by community and reflected the experiences.

Um the experiences whose forced labor and unwilling sorry, I'm easily distracted, unwilling transport via the middle passage and who built this country.

Um, and that was the lens that we had created this um labor acknowledgement from.

You all um may have received the language from Councilman Flynn, um which he sent over after the last um Finbiz meeting about the labor acknowledgement.

This ultimately became the basis for the continued stakeholding conversations about the labor acknowledgement that we had, and so we did have the opportunity to circulate this.

I did want to share this in I did want to share um proposed language as well that we received from Council President Romero Campbell.

We did not use this language to stakeholder any conversations as we received it last Wednesday afternoon.

Um, but we did want to include it here to provide a full accounting of the language that we did receive from other council members.

Um, and so I wanted to thank the council members for sending over the alternate alternate languages that they provided.

Thank you.

Um just a reminder here's a coalition that we work with in crafting the original acknowledgement.

We work with them to stakeholder the amended language that came from Councilman Flynn as well, and so these groups did have their eyes on the labor acknowledgement from Councilman Flynn, but not the one from Council President.

Following our previous committee committee discussions, excuse me, we held two office hours style community conversations on September 15th and September 16th.

These were intentionally and for these were intentionally informal spaces where people could drop in, listen, participate, and leave as they saw fit.

Across both conversations, we heard a clear and consistent message from participants across generations and economic backgrounds that there was no desire to expand or change the scope of the labor acknowledgement.

And uh and what we heard was that they that the specificity of the acknowledgement mattered to them.

And so this ignite the acknowledgement names a particular and consequential part of American history, the force and uncompensated labor of enslaved Africans and their descendants.

Naming the histories specifically does not diminish the experiences of other communities whose labor was exploited, nor does it diminish the importance of acknowledging those histories in their own right.

In fact, we heard the opposite, and so participants expressed concern that grouping distinct histories together under a broad category of past injustices would risk diminishing all of them.

Different communities experience this different systems of exploitation, exclusion, displacement, and violence, and those histories deserve the dignity and precision of being acknowledged for what they were not flattened into a single narrative.

We also heard a desire for solidarity without erasure.

And so community members wanted this history recognizes a standalone issue while expressing a willingness to stand alongside other communities, seeking the same specificity and recognition for their own histories.

And finally, we heard that specificity matter not only because of our past, but because of what we intended to do next.

This ignorant acknowledgement is largely symbolic if it ends with acknowledgement alone.

Its value is also in creating a foundation for action for understanding how the legacy of slavery continues to inform present-day disparities and for connecting that understanding to practical policy conversations from state level efforts around reparations to local work addressing home ownership and wealth building.

When we dilute the history, we risk diluting our ability to clearly identify the harms we were trying to address and the policies necessary to address them.

The message we heard from community was very clear.

Recognizing this history specificities does not prevent us from recognizing others.