Joining us for this weekly joint meeting of the mayor and Denver City Council.

Follow along as the mayor and city council members hear updates from city agencies and projects, discuss important city matters, and hear about what's happening across the Mile High City.

Join the discussion with your elected officials starting now.

All right, everybody, good morning, and welcome to Mayor Council.

Um, we will start with some introductions and then uh jump into our general session.

Good morning, all of us.

Distinguished gentleman from district six, like to start us off.

Yeah, I would, and thanks for your kind words about uh uh Secretary Penny last night.

Thank you for letting me come.

Great deal.

Uh Paul Cashman, South Denver District Six.

Good morning, Mandasawyer District Five.

Good morning, Serena Gonzalez Petrez, one of your council members at large.

Buenos días, Florida Vitres of Lucky District 7.

Morning, Darren Watson, representing the fine district nine.

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

Jamie Torres, West Denver District Three.

Great, thank you.

Well, good morning, everybody.

Are there any announcements that uh members have they'd like to make for the listening public at home or for any of their fellow council members?

Councilman Cashman.

Yeah, thank you, Mayor.

Um, past few years this this council has made it very clear in our belief that we all win when we strengthen our constituents' ability to play a role in their own own governance and uh uh along with uh uh your partnership uh the early stages of standing up our office division of community empowerment.

Uh, my office, along with Councilman Gonzalez Guterres has done incredible outreach uh over the past uh few months in and in speaking to people at public events about uh their thoughts on our registered neighborhood organization system.

Um September 10th, we're having the first of four public meetings, um specifically uh a neighborhood engagement workshops to get people together to uh uh with with the uh RNOs as a starting point.

How can we best uh engage them in their own governance?

So that's gonna be September tenth, six to eight p.m.

Uh, and at the Westwood Community Center, one thousand South Lowell Boulevard.

So we hope people would would turn out, uh, let us hear their voice, um, and uh pay attention.

We'll have, as I said, uh, three more public meetings around the city to engage people and uh move this discussion forward.

Thank you for doing that.

Other announcements.

President Protestant.

Thank you.

Um, on September 6th, uh, we are going to have our final event for the summer series, the South by Southeast, where uh you belong series at Eisenhower Park.

We are going to have Denver Jazz Orchestra come and play.

There'll be a few food trucks out there.

We ask people to bring a blanket and low chairs and maybe an umbrella if it's really if it rains.

But it's it starts at four, and we are gonna have, wait a minute.

We are gonna have uh who's the opening act.

Um Guyana and the street.

Yep, that's it.

Guayanna acoustica.

I'm like, I'm gonna look at it closer.

Uh Guyana Acoustica is gonna open at four and um play and we'll have just some live music and gathering and fun.

Um, some people have asked, uh, there are some temporary bollards that were put up along Eisenhower uh park for um to allow uh for pedestrians while the Dahlia Bridge is under construction.

Um we've worked with Dottie, so thank you to be able to take those down temporarily, and they'll be put back up until the bridge is done.

So just kind of setting expectations.

The ballards are gonna be down, but they're gonna go back up until the bridge is done.

So thank you.

Thank you, President Protein.

Other announcements, I'll do a part two, please.

Mayor, uh forgot to mention if if residents will Google uh your city, your voice, Denver, they'll get to the details about the uh neighborhood engagement workshop as well as the survey that uh we're asking folks to take uh almost a thousand responses already.

People's attitudes on uh engagement.

Wonderful, thank you.

Yes, sir.

Other announcements, Councilman Watson.

It's more of a thank you.

Um Mayor Johnson and and President Sandoval, um, the Pena family, Secretary Pena, Mayor Pena and his family.

Just um uh wanted to say thank you to this council and to the administration for the honor last night.

They had an amazing time, and for folks who didn't see it, um that uh city council provided a proclamation honoring his 42nd uh year since his um inauguration and um um they greatly appreciate it and greatly uh appreciate the opportunity to come back, especially here to walk into Parr Widener, um, two of the um the individuals that help um create kind of the the EFOS um um imagine great city.

Um this library is named after them, and they were greatly it was emotional for them, their full administration.

So thank you, uh President Sandoval.

Thank you, Mr.

Johnson for allowing us to do that.

It was a really powerful evening.

Thank you for doing it.

It was also great to see so many members of their administration who came back for that event last night as a full house.

Um, it was an interesting learning for me.

He was shocked to find out that we do mayor counsel in here.

Yeah, he used to do it all in his office, and so he will bring us all in a small people together.

I don't think it's a chairs around the table.

Um that sounded fun.

I'm sure we could all fit.

Um any other announcements.

I don't think he had 13 council members.

I wondered about that.

Yeah, the number has increased since he was on um, I think there were eleven.

Okay, I wondered about that.

Um, well, I do have an announcement while we're uh making them.

I think it is I wanted to just congratulate one of our very own Madam President uh who was recognized last week as one of the 25 most powerful women uh in business in Colorado for all of her incredible leadership.

So congratulations on the very well learned.

Uh any other announcements where we jump into the general session.

Okay, great.

Um well, two things uh as we get into budget season.

Um, one is we've done our first round of briefings with council members this week and gotten good feedback from you all on uh what information you'd like to have, how you'd like to have it, how we make sure and get it to you.

And so while you're in the midst of uh session last night, I think we sent out an email that overviewed the process for how we'll try to keep you engaged and get all the information you need over these next month or so.

And so that would include um three rounds of public briefing sessions at Mayor Council.

First one will be today, uh, one next Tuesday, and then the following Tuesday, which will be a chance for us to just preview some of the structural changes to departments that you've had a lot of questions about in terms of what the impact of either uh personnel changes, vacancy or layoffs were to those departments' core functions.

I'll let you know this is obviously not a full budget briefing.

We do not have the entire budget closed, and we won't be able to speak to dollars and cents, but it does allow you to see conceptually how these departments are envisioning what their why is, what their top purpose and mission is and how they've restructured to try to deliver that mission.

So we'll do that in three briefings.

Then we have three rounds of individual briefings.

The first will be obviously the ones we've done last week and this week.

The second will be the week of September 8th before the budget book is announced.

We've had questions about well, we've balanced about 104 million of the 200 million dollar gap.

Where will the other 100 million come from?

That is mostly supplies, services, contracts.

But we will the week of September 8 pre-brief each of the council members on that final hundred of the budget before the budget book is released on the 15th.

And then we'll do another round of briefings after the budget books comes out on the 15th, in preparation for the hearings.

That's really three full rounds of private briefings before the hearings, three rounds of public briefings.

The idea to just try to get you as much information as we can.

We realize this is unprecedented amount of info for you, but we think given the uh unusual cycle that we're in, we want to make sure everyone has all the information they need.

So that's a bit about what we're gonna do as an overview and a frame on today.

Um, for today, we've brought four departments to give you quick overviews.

And uh, knowing everyone's timing, this obviously won't be a full budget briefing.

We won't have times for uh tons of questions, but what I'll do is have each of these uh organizations' executive directors present, call it around 10 minutes.

We'll have them all go in sequence, and then we'll take time for questions at the end.

If we don't get through all the questions, any questions that you have that we don't get through, uh, you can email to Angela, and what she will do is have those executive directors uh weave those questions into the full budget briefing to make sure you get those questions answered.

If not today, um at the full briefings.

Uh, let me say one word about the ages that we have this morning, uh, which is a little bit unique combination, and then we'll let them jump in.

We have four departments here.

We have CASAR, uh, we have Office of Children's Affairs, we have DOTI, and we have Arts and Venues.

Um, those represent a couple of uh, I think unique parts of the budget to bring you.

Obviously, for OCA and CASER, we have two of our smaller organizations but very focused on getting dollars out into community partners and how to help support that work in the community.

They'll talk a bit about how they've restructured to try to do that.

Dotti, we have one of our largest agencies, which has a lot of core public services people have questions about.

Want to be able to speak and address how they've thought about those changes, what that will look like for the public services that you all care a lot about.

And then uh arts and venues.

Uh, it will be the one case study of a one place where we have had a consolidation of an agency.

Um, the Office of Special Events, which was created by ordinance.

Uh, we are now looking to merge together with the arts and venues team.

Uh, and so Gretchen will walk you through the very thoughtful process they've gone through, uh, and talk to you about the process that would involve ordinance change if it were to come through council for how to restructure how that department is described.

Um, Arts and Menus has done one version of this before in 2011 when they were consolidated, but I think Gretchen and uh Katie Strasina have done a very thoughtful job of approaching how to do that.

So a little bit of something of everything in terms of how these departments have gone about this, but we thought it might be a representative sample for you.

Many of you have seen this information already, and so at your request, and so some of it might not be new, but we thought for the folks at home, it'd be a good chance to get an overview of what's happening in these departments.

Um with that intro, uh I will introduce Liz.

I think it's gonna go first and start with Katra, and we'll jump in.

Thank you, Liz, for being here.

Good morning.

Uh thank you for having me this morning.

I am excited to talk you through our strategy for how we both are aligning the work that we're doing towards our mission and addressing the budget challenge.

So next slide, please.

So, first I wanted to talk with you about our kind of strategic overview, and this is really the why.

Why did we do this?

Um, you all remember we were created five years ago.

We opened our doors in the middle of 2020 in the middle of COVID.

Um, we built a really great organization.

Um, we kind of sometimes refer to ourselves as a startup organization.

Um, in many ways, it's felt that way.

We were moving fast, we were trying to get money out the door into the community.

Um, and we're five years in now, and we're a more mature organization, and actually, regardless of this um budget challenge that we are currently facing as a city, this was the right time for us to make changes as an organization to make sure that we can still continue to deliver the highest impact programs going forward.

And so we're also kind of towards the end of our first five-year plan, as you recall in the ordinance for the climate protection fund that you all referred to the vote, you know, this body referred to the voters.

It requires us to do a five-year plan every five years.

And so we are looking ahead to how we continue to deliver for our community.

So the goals for our process within our agency included focusing on the highest impact work, and that's obviously aligned with our mission and ordinance as an agency.

It's aligned with the purpose and allowable uses of the climate protection fund and other ordinances that we are responsible for administering.

So that's how we're defining that highest impact is really aligned with a lot of the things that are already codified.

And then the other thing that we've heard both internally from our own team and then our leadership team has really observed is that as we grew, we had a lot of silos in the way that we were delivering the work.

So we're eliminating those silos to better integrate solutions across the agency to have better outcomes for the community.

And I'll talk a little bit more about that as we as we go through the slides.

We also identified efficiencies in our financial and administrative processes.

So you all may recall we brought a contract forward a few months back that is an integrated contract to deliver rebates, incentives, and mini grants out into the community.

So rather than having each one of those things be its own individual transaction, its own individual contract, each with its own associated invoice and you know financial process that has to be done, we're integrating that in a way that makes it more much more efficient to deliver.

We're preserving funding delivered directly to the community.

That's another important piece of this.

And this is where we have to look at that balance between personnel costs and other funds that go out into the community to really deliver impact in the community.

And then finally, we're streamlining our program delivery to ease access for the public.

So when we set things up, you know, we were kind of setting up our office program by program.

And we've ended up having programs, as I mentioned, not just the team itself, but programs that are also siloed.

So we want to better integrate the program delivery so that if you're a nonprofit or you're a resident or you're a business, you have a whole suite of things that you can easily access through one sort of portal or one way to apply for that money.

And then our strategies to achieve this through this process included shifting aligned positions into the Climate Protection Fund from the general fund, as well as eliminating vacant positions and some filled positions.

I did want to note on the vacant positions, we actually had a number of vacant positions that have never been filled.

And that was because, again, as a startup organization, you think you might have a need, and then you realize you don't have that need, and you think there's a better way to deliver something.

So a lot of the vacancies that we eliminated were positions that had never been filled previously.

So while we were a high percentage, I do think that we were strategic in how we looked at which positions we kept versus those that we eliminated.

Next slide.

So this is our future state org structure.

So you can see we have four divisions, the climate action division, which focuses on eliminating carbon pollution, sustainability and resiliency.

So that's our zero waste and circularity work, helping our community adapt to climate change impacts, conserving natural resources and ecosystems, communications and engagement, and then finance and administration.

And throughout all of our work, we're integrating equity, environmental justice, and climate justice.

Next slide.

So here's where I'm gonna talk a little bit more about what is the work that we're actually doing and how are we better aligned through this new structure to actually deliver.

So as I mentioned, it's very aligned with what was in the ordinance that created our office, the ordinance that created the climate protection fund, and other ordinances that we're responsible for administering.

So first and foremost, rapidly cutting carbon pollution, which also helps improve local air quality.

So it's a win-win there.

Supporting community climate adaptation and resilience, you know, responding to extreme heat, to drought, to other extreme weather events, and preparing ourselves for that future.

Reducing or eliminating waste and building circular material systems, so things like the waste and war ordinance and those types of efforts.

Conserving natural resources again, conserving water, for example, very critical in our region, and protecting ecosystems and biodiversity.

And then again, integrating equity, green workforce, environmental and climate justice throughout all of our programs in partnership with other city agencies.

So, for example, you know, we have a really strong language access program in the agency.

We will continue to do that.

How do we deliver those programs so that everybody has access?

Everybody can find what they need from our office and be able to get in touch with those resources that they might need through our team.

Integrating environmental or climate justice throughout our work, for example, with our carbon pollution reduction work.

How are we ensuring that we are looking at lower income households with folks with respiratory conditions and improving the indoor air quality by doing some of the electrification and the efficiency work in those homes?

So we're integrating that throughout.

We're partnering with Dido on Green Workforce.

We know that we don't have enough skilled workers in all of the trades that we need to build all of the you know infrastructure that we need to really deliver this carbon-free future and resilient future.

So all of those things are integrated throughout all of the work that we're doing.

So I just wanted to close by saying I'm I'm even though it's been a very difficult time, I'm very excited about the work that we're doing and excited that we can continue to deliver our mission and also very grateful that we actually as a city have the resources that we do to deliver this because that's not actually the case in many other cities, and many of my colleagues are struggling to figure out how they're going to deliver on the same goals and mission that they have without those resources.

So thank you for your time.

And then maybe we'll turn it over to our next presenter.

If you have questions, definitely hang on and you'll have a chance to get close after we get through our other content.

So thank you so much, Liz Jess.

We'll give it to you to talk about Office of Children's Affairs.

Good morning, council members.

I'm excited to be here to share with you a little bit about the process and the thinking and the direction forward for the Office of Children's Affairs and the great work that we've been doing and continue, will continue to do, with the same level of service and delivery.

So you can go to the next slide.

Wanted to start with uh our why and you know, as we're thinking about a budget-constrained environment, what are the things that we're thinking about that really we need to be mindful of as we're setting our direction forward?

And so really know that what drove much of our restructure is thinking about how we can connect and align work and reduce silos within our office.

We want to be able, we're focused on elevating youth voice, and you'll hear more of that through some of the programs that we're going to talk about.

And at the end of the day, really thinking about maximizing the funding that we're putting out into community.

We see our office as the support for so many of the organizations that are doing incredible work in the community, and we know that continuing to partner with those community organizations is going to be critical to the continued services that kids and families will receive.

And so some of that reorganization really had to do with us streamlining our internal operations and our functions to be able to do a better job there in order to maximize a lot of the funding that is going out into the community.

As I said, our commitment to level of partnership that we have with organizations, as well as to the service and delivery, is absolutely still there and paramount in the work that we're doing.

If you look at this org chart here, you can see that we're really doubling down on the kind of the trajectory of a child's life.

So thinking about those first three buckets there, continued focus on early childhood care and education, knowing that both the care aspect and the education aspect is really important.

And a lot of this work that we do is achieved through our partnership with Denver Preschool program, because they are supporting many of our preschool learners, but we're also working to be able to think about our infant and toddlers across across the city and have exciting, hopefully, new pilot programs to be able to announce soon that will support infant and toddlers as we're looking to expand that work.

We will continue to host Head Start as we have for the past 30 years here in the city.

We serve over 1,100 kids on an annual basis and early head start and head start, which I'm sure many of you know is kind of the most robust set of services that any of our early childhood learners and families have access to anywhere in the country, which is really exciting.

And then thinking about our youth development and engagement.

So this is a place where you see a change in our org chart because formerly we've had a number of different programs that are serving that age range of kids.

So thinking about school age all the way up to the age of 24.

And through this reorganization of the work that we're doing, we want to be able to ensure that all of those programs are connected and communicating with each other.

So if you go to the next slide, we might we might go back here.

We can look at this as a deep dive.

So our Child Friendly Cities Initiative work, our mayor's youth commission, the Denver After School Alliance and Youth Workforce, those were all different components serving similar age demographics that were spread out in different places in our office.

And so thinking about this time that we had and an opportunity to make shifts that we were able to.

We want to be able to think about our Denver After School Alliance members, so our out of school time providers that provide services for all of our school age kids.

They also happen to be the largest youth employers across the city as well.

And so operating those as two separate buckets was not as efficient as we could be.

And an example is I was at a meeting with some of our out-of-school time providers this week and being able to actually integrate into our conversations discussions around youth workforce and how that continues to support youth as they're a little bit older, but on that same trajectory of being able to realize where they want to be in adulthood and young adulthood.

There are some really strong connections there that we intend to strengthen.

Same thing with the Mayor's Youth Commission, which obviously is a structure that has supported youth in the city for a long time, but we're thinking about how do we make that stronger connection with our youth workforce with other youth across the community that might enjoy serving on the people's budget, that might enjoy serving on other commissions so that we are really embedding youth voice in everything that we're doing here in the city.

So as we look forward, these are these are places where we're engaging with community partners already and welcome any feedback and conversation that council members want to be able to engage with on how this will actually look in the community.

But we know that we're going to continue to really invest in partnership, both with our community partners and other youth-serving organizations inside and outside of the city, knowing that Denver Parks and Recreation and Denver Public Library will also be, we aim to strengthen that partnership to continue to serve youth in the best way that we can as a city.

So with that in closing, just want to appreciate your your support during this time of change, and again share my commitment that our service and delivery aims to be just as strong and stronger into the future.

Thank you so much, Jess.

Baby Ford, you are up next.

Tell us about Dottie.

All right.

So they spoke about the course services, and so we will do the same if you've lived.

So Dottie obviously has its fingers and a lot of pies across the city.

And when we sit and we talk about what we were looking at and how we are investigating all of this, is we we assign some really core principles to how we did this and this evaluation.

It was not only just how we are reimagined with purpose, it was with that focus on those core and charter services.

And you know, when I say core and charter services, I think you can picture them as you go through, and sort of this is back to that Dottie guidance there that we have to do it by charter.

We have to have a city engineer who works on program and project delivery.

We have to have a city traffic engineer who focuses on our streets and our street safety and our mobility.

We must be doing solid waste and ensuring that we have trash pickup and the like, and we must be able to deliver our sanitary and our water systems so that we keep our our, you know, our city clean and efficient.

And so we examined all of that, but with this focus on those essential service levels and what that is and what that looks like.

But doing so in a way that allowed us to really carefully then also look at application of industry best practices.

Should we be thinking about different opportunities with technology solutions?

How do we think then about those KPIs for services and where are they and what are they, and might they change or adjust as we're looking at how we still achieve that goal of keeping our and protecting those core and charter services?

So when you look to the right, the reason I have this up here is for Dotti, this was not just, and although you've seen it and you've seen it in the numbers, they are bigger for Dotti because we are, of course, a bigger organization, but they are bigger.

But it is not just a story about cuts or changes, but it is also that part of how we think about what a sustainable sustainable DOTI really looks like.

We carefully thought through things like regulatory modernization.

I've shared with you a couple of you, this will be something that will likely be coming up to you here soon from an ordinance perspective about how do we think about enforcement?

How do we apply, for instance, to technology services?

And in this instance, the technology service is US mail.

How do we actually start mailing people tickets as opposed to having to personally affix them to a vehicle, which takes extra time?

It actually is as much of a safety issue with our team members who get chased down sometimes by people who are really unhappy about their street sweeping tickets.

But how do we take advantage of different technologies, different approaches, different techniques to create a more efficient work system?

We're exploring different areas and we continue to do so in our wastewater and our regulatory environments for water and transportation, about the reviews that we do, self-certification opportunities, we coordinate and collaborate with uh CPD on some of this.

We're also thinking about process efficiencies in regards to our programs.

Transportation, water includes everything in water, our operations to wastewater, etc.

But when we talk about program efficiencies, and this will relate to the sort of the next pieces of this, as we look at strategic resource allocations across the board.

Also, then how do we continue to deliver the work?

So I use the example in transportation, as we looked at at differences impacts of our vacancy savings and others.

We've also started looking at how we do business.

We've had people who individually handle, I work the planning side, then I work the design side, then we work the program management and the project delivery side, i.e.

the construction management.

So there's a pass off in each of those.

How do we think about team members who take a project from cradle to grave and what does that look like?

So some of these efficiencies and some of these program alignments are areas that we're wrapping into this overall process and how we do this.

So if you could flip to the next slide then, we have an org chart here, and what I want to just share on this org chart is this is an org chart that is general funded.

So it does not include solid waste and most of the solid waste SRF, and it does not include wastewater.

There is a small portion of solid waste that has general funding, and that is for our DAT and our encampment teams, the people who do the graffiti and the homeless encampment cleanups.

And as I've shared with you, to the left again are these core business functions.

They are the what we have to do.

And as you're aware, what we have seen and what we did then in DOTI is we were not necessarily consolidating good groups the way our colleagues here in CASAR and OCA were doing.

Instead, what we looked at was strategic resource alignment that was taken through the organization at strategic points where we felt like we had duplications of services.

We could consolidate small groups under a single supervisor rather than having two supervisors.

But what we did not touch is we did not touch project delivery.

So I was active project managers, construction managers, those people delivering our bond projects, their engineers, they were not touched by our layoffs.

Our trash collection was not touched by our layoffs.

But what we did see is we did do strategic alignment.

And so with our administrative services that threaded throughout all of the organization, we consolidated those and created efficiencies there.

Strategic communications, we also continue to pull that out, which I think will be for better outcomes and how we're working with community, community engagement and the like.

But I think you also realize that as we move through this, not only did we have some layoffs, we also had some vacancies and abolishments of positions.

Some of these abolishments of positions were positions that had been sitting for a while.

So they were sitting for a while, not necessarily actively in work or that kind of thing at this point.

And so we shed some of those.

But we will have some impacts attached to some of these overall uh changes related to vacancies and some of these layoffs.

And so I've shared with some of you that what we will see and what we're looking at, and again, back to sort of the organizational efficiencies and how we mitigate for some of that.

But I use our area engineers as an example that relates to you all in your work.

3 1 1 calls are what you get all the time.

They copy you, they copy us, and they say, hey, put the stop sign here.

That's the example I always use because let's be honest, there's like 50% of our calls tend to be stop signs or put a stoplight here.

And with that, we have a team who takes that in, and it does not go just into a black hole, it does actually get evaluated very carefully.

And so we spend about eight to ten weeks doing that.

Should it be there, why, what would the benefit be?

Could we improve safety, etc.

And we believe that with some of these changes and adjustments, although we did not touch these folks directly on the layoff side, what we do see is some vacancies in some of those groups.

So for transportation delivery is an example, and so what you'll see is maybe an extension.

It may take a couple weeks longer to be able to do that evaluation.

You'll see on some of our projects that are not in the active pipeline right now that there will be some that will sit longer in that pipeline before they move through into planning and design.

And so that may extend by a few months or a few other elements.

Also, knowing that our projects and our project pipeline is not just a function of the people who are there to do the work of it, but it's also a function of the capital dollars to be able to help advance the project, things like that.

So those are some of the elements that we see will have some impact.

There will be some small impacts that we see, for instance, on our right-of-way services team.

Want to make clear that uh we did not have any layoffs attached to our enforcement, uh, and so the staffing that we've had available for our right-of-way enforcement effectively continues now, and so it's the same levels there.

But um, small little things on you know, hey, a reduction of inspections, for instance, on a weekend for horizontal projects, meaning like transportation projects.

We might not be able to do a Saturday inspection.

So I wanted to say some of those things out loud because I think it's important to know that as we did this, there was nothing that we stopped doing effectively because so much of what we do is in that have to column.

But how we carefully evaluated sort of the impact of this, but then also continue to ensure that we truly stay focused on those core services and those core models, and then carefully really looking at those essential service levels that we want to continue to deliver to the people of uh Denver.

So that's where we were in this whole process.

Thank you for your questions, and we'll get to it in a minute.

Thank you so much, Amy.

Uh, we'll bring up Gretchen and then we'll open up for questions if folks have them.

Thank you, Gretchen.

Yeah, good morning, mayor, members of the city council.

I'm Gretchen Haller.

I'm the executive director of Denver Arts and Venues, and as the mayor alluded to, our process was a little bit different.

We are not funded through the general fund, we are largely a special revenue fund agency, and most of our budget is spent managing large venues.

But we did see an opportunity here to consolidate with the Office of Special Events, and I know many of you were part of that original formation of the office.

The work has been happening for a long time, but an ordinance was passed in 2021 to formalize a lot of that.

So our thinking here, and most of the work still needs to occur on this.

So we will be back in front of you as we go through this, and I'll walk through those steps.

We are planning to absorb the budget and personnel of the seven FTEs, full-time equivalent employees of the Office of Special Events starting this year.

So our goal was to start absorbing those costs earlier to relieve the general fund beginning in July of 2025 and then continuing.

I will go through a timeline of what that looks like on the next slide.

We will need to come back to you with the ordinance that created the office for your consideration once we go through this process and we know what those changes would be.

And I do want to thank Katie Strasina and her team.

We've been in touch with them, and they have been terrific partners in this, and we uh want to keep the standard of delivery to clients and customers and other service to other city departments as we go through this.

Just for your reference, uh, this is not a new type of proposal for arts and venues in 2011.

It was the end of the Hickenlooper administration and the Denver Office of Cultural Affairs, DOCA, merged with what was then theaters and arenas, creating the newly named department of Denver Arts and Venues.

So everything old is new again, but we are doing this again with this opportunity with the Office of Special Events.

On the next slide, I've got the timeline.

So in July, we started to absorb those expenditures to provide some general fund relief.

And we have two big initiatives August, September, and October.

One is a rapid improvement event with Peak Performance to look for efficiencies for core services.

And there was feedback received from the QR codes that the Peak team put forward to employees and to residents that there could be efficiencies here.

It involves a number of different city departments.

So that is part of the delay in us doing this work.

We want to bring those departments together and walk through this.

It will also require an update potentially to the rules and regs that have been created for the Office of Special Events, and that would require a public hearing.

And so there is a lot of work to be done here still.

At the same time, we're working closely with OSE Office of Special Events to determine core services and those key work streams to look at what those efficiencies could be and how to absorb this work into arts and venues.

So October and November, we anticipate coming back to you for consideration of changes to the ordinance.

Those could be small to large, depending on what the work products tell us.

We will look to amend the rules and regulations at the same time, and very important to us is going to be the staff and customer notifications, so there are no surprises for when this becomes fully realized in Q1 first quarter of 2026.

The next two slides are the arts and venues org chart.

That administrative box that is there on the left is where we think that a lot of this function will be absorbed.

It's where we manage our operations needs, some of our security, some of those shared functions with the Office of Special Events right now.

And if you look on the next slide, that's just a reminder of the venues that we operate, the arts complex, all of the theaters there, arenas division is Red Rocks and Lyceum, McNichols Building, and then of course our new venue at Loretta Heights.

So more to come from us.

Thank you so much, Gretchen.

I think we are now at the stage where we can open up for questions.

So I may bring all four members of the dream team back to the table here.

And I will let council members jump in.

I have so far Council Torres and Councilman Sawyer in the queue.

Great.

Council Torres, you can start us off.

Thank you, and just want to say thank you all for your leadership as women in the city.

I really appreciate seeing you here.

So one, I just want to thank you for this preview.

I think it helps give me at least a bit more information before just the new budget landing on us, and especially knowing some things are changing this year.

I think that's been really important for me to feel like I am understanding some of the things that are happening in the departments.

Um I will just kind of fire off my questions so that other council members can get in the queue and happy to touch base afterwards for follow-up.

Um for CASER, Liz, you mentioned that equity would be integrated throughout and uh environmental justice EJ's been, I think, an important part of what CASAR does.

So just trying to understand is there no longer kind of an EJ team, or are is it looks different somehow at this point?

Yeah, thank you for that question.

So they the EJ team, uh we still have all the team members, and what we're looking at is how to integrate them within the divisions that we have currently.

So they will have more leadership support, first of all, and second of all, because all of them report to me right now, okay.

Um so, and then second of all, integrating them with the programs that we have.

So, um, for example, thinking about some of the um indigenous programming that we're doing, connecting that with our sustainability and resiliency work.

So, if we're thinking about things like wildfire, um biodiversity, ecosystems, natural resources.

How can those things actually work more closely together?

Because those things are happening on two separate teams right now.

So, when I mentioned silos, you know, we have the seven allowable uses of the fund.

One is administration, the other six are the program areas, the focus areas.

We set up teams that were siloed in that way, and we're seeing that that's not actually serving the outcomes as well as we'd hope.

So we're bringing that together and um working with those team members actually to pull them in into those conversations to how we can actually make those programs stronger.

Okay, perfect.

Thank you.

And equity is is across our whole agency.

We have a very robust EDI team as well, and that's um been in place since the beginning of the agency, and that will continue.

Super, thank you, Liz.

Um, Gretchen, um, it for me it makes total sense putting special events into arts and venues.

Um I was one of the votes against the creation of the office just because it felt like a weird kind of standalone and having to have all of its own infrastructure for a very small office.

Um just felt a little off.

So this actually is really reassuring, and um I think aligns really well with what Arts and Venues already does.

So that's super interesting, and I'm glad I know that um at this point.

So thank you, thank you for that update.

Um uh one thing um maybe for all of you, especially as you're implementing new ways of um organization and strategy.

Um Peak Academy was designed to have employees who are doing the work evaluate, assess, and give recommendations on how the city can be more efficient.

I really implore you to use that, use city employees and the knowledge and expertise that they have in the jobs that they're doing to help be a part of these efficiency creations.

Um I think that's one of the repairs, frankly, that I think can really help with um uh employee morale and trust is that they are a part of uh making sure things work and um in a way where you know you're using them as experts.

So um I just I just hope that that's um uh will continue to be and relied upon for this moving forward.

The other that I've mentioned, and I mentioned um this to the mayor in a prior briefing.

Um Department of Public Health and Environment has just released their health assessment tool, um, their community health assessment tool, and it isn't just about physical health, it is about it is about community health.

Um, and so I really implore you, every single agency director in the city to look to it to figure out okay, this is how the community wants us to respond to them.

They have been extensively um asked for their input about what makes you feel healthy and safe in your community, and it has everything to do with the environment and climate, with um transportation and infrastructure, with kids, um, with culture, and so being able to use that as also kind of a compass for how the city is able to bounce back and able to meet needs.

Um, we would be responding directly to what community told us they want if we were able to bring it back through that lens.

Um, and uh I think that was it.

Oh, and I just wanted to mention um the merger that you talked about it under Hickenlooper, 100%, right?

Constantly looking at where things are kind of grown out of, and HRCP was always kind of this um uh try it and let's see if it works and let's see if it can stand on its own.

Um things like children's affairs came up out of HRCP.

Arts and venues in some capacity came up out of HRCP.

So there is kind of this incubation um opportunity for us to figure out where do things have good alignment, where is there better efficiency?

So I'm I don't think anybody would would say that we're opposed to change, just the why is always the really important factor.

So thank you all.

Thanks so much, Council Torres.

Um, just to add to the one point you mentioned about Peak, that uh the Peak team and Megan Williams have been involved with us from the beginning with city employees working on in each agency where the places that they see opportunities for improvement for streamlining for um for efficiencies, and so we and we continue to rely on them to think through more of these innovations.

So they've been a really wonderful uh part of this process.

We can imagine engage them even more as we go forward.

Okay, next up, I have Councilman Swear.

Thank you.

Thanks, you guys.

Hold on, I'm gonna back up so I can see all four of you.

Thank you, you guys.

I very much appreciate um uh all of this information.

I think it is really valuable.

I will follow Council Torres's lead and just give you comments, and then when we do our one-on-ones, you can answer questions for me.

So, overarching question um for all of you that I think is really important and I'd like to know more about the metrics you're using to determine success of this restructuring.

So the slides were super helpful in terms of how you are restructuring, but what is still sort of missing for me is how is that going to make a difference?

How is that going to improve service delivery, improve timing, um improve employee morale, and improve our relationship with our residents?

So would love to know more kind of about the what outcomes you are looking for out of the restructuring that you have done, overarching.

So that's number one.

Um, number two, and this sort of speaks to that a little bit, but um, for each of you, there are there's feedback I receive from my residents, right?

Um, I will just give two quick examples, right?

Number one for arts and venues.

Um, and if special events is folding in, I think that that is great.

The number one thing we hear from our registered neighborhood organizations is that the um rules and regs that are in place with the Office of Special Events are too onerous for a small volunteer organization, they are meant to be a situation um for a very very large street festival, not a fourth of July bike around the park, um, but the fourth of July bike around the park is included in there, and so um I would love to know more about like, okay, so you're taking this on.

How are you going to impact the needs that are at that we actually hear from our residents?

So that's one example.

A second example I'll just use Dottie is the curbside access plan.

So you said you are reducing some of the administrative side of things as it comes to our right of way, but right of way is the one to do curbside access plan.

Cherry Creek has a curbside access plan, it's not been implemented in 18 months.

Um Hale was supposed to start a curbside access plan in 2024.

There is no date on the books at late 2025 of when that's going to start.

So I'm concerned that some of the changes that have been made are gonna delay that kind of stuff that actually impacts our residents even longer, and that's why I asked about the metrics, and so I would love to know kind of more specifics, not only about the general overarching restructuring and what those goals are and what the metrics are, but also that that specific those specific kinds of impacts to our residents.

So I'll leave it there.

This is great.

Thank you all very much for this, um, and would love to kind of know a little bit more in depth.

Thanks.

If there's any brief comments you want to give out, Gretchen, you may want to chime in on the special events if you have thoughts, and then if folks want to give any early indications on these answers on outcomes, great.

If that we can take those for more thorough feedback in the briefings, I defer to you.

But Gretchen, you want to so I saw you nodding because I know you know had the same conversation that Councilman Sawyer raised.

Yeah, we actually uh Arts and he's actually used to do film permitting in the way back.

So this really is a return, but that is one of the points of feedback uh that created the peak effort so that we can look at that same problem across how uh special events are coordinating across departments and how to ease some of the administrative burden, particularly for small events, so that we encourage them.

So, yeah, that's on our radar, and we will talk specifically to that when we come back with the changes.

Can I just ask one quick follow-up question on that?

Um, so there's also a piece of this that involves parks, right?

Because um, the actual permitting initially starts in parks.

Um, so curious whether maybe that is a restructuring and maybe parks is gonna come in a couple of weeks and tell us more about it, but just would love to know more about whether there's a some streamlining happening there too.

Yeah, the rapid improvement event includes at a minimum office of special events, CPD, Dottie, uh, police, excise, parks, fire.

So um, that is the uh what the event will be across a couple of days to tie into all of those department processes and come back to you with a proposed uh absorption work structure and some of those rule changes if they're if they're needed.

Yeah, very helpful.

Thanks.

And maybe we'll just circle back on the outcomes question.

That's a good deep question, one we should spend some time on.

Thank you.

Uh, next in the queue, I think I have president.

Oh no, I have Councilman Alvidris next.

Thank you, Mayor.

Thank you all so much for being here and giving us some insight into how this could affect us.

I mostly have questions for CASAR and Office of Children's Affairs off the bat, which is I'm curious, um, you said that the highest impact work is what you are focusing on.

And when I think of that, I think of the work that directly affects the people living in the district.

So, you can just say a little bit more about that.

I think it helped me understand what you mean by that.

And then my second question is both of you mentioned grant funding.

Do you expect an uptick in grant funding because of the layoffs, or what does that what was that?

Sure.

I'm happy to answer both of those.

So with regard to highest impact work, again, we are really focused on delivering for the community.

So we want to make sure that we are investing in programs that have a high return in terms of how many dollars are going in versus how much GHD reduction and the associated air pollution reduction that we're seeing from that program.

So, not getting too much into the question that Councilwoman Sawyer asked, but that's one of the metrics that we actually use is uh dollars, you know, GHG reduced per dollar spent.

Um, we are also looking at equity.

We actually, that's our EDI team is working on equity metrics right now because we want to make sure that we're also distributing those dollars equitably across the community that we're looking at households that may not be able to fully afford the cost of some of the energy transition that we want to see in the community.

So, how do we make those investments and integrating the program so they're more effective?

So, right now, like we have a program for nonprofits that does solar, but we also have a program that helps through the energized Denver Small Buildings program where they can do lighting.

We want to integrate things more so that it's one point of access rather than multiple points of access with potentially slightly different criteria.

So it's really about again the highest impact things towards reducing emission, the highest impact things to address our climate vulnerabilities like heat.

And so identifying those strategies, executing on those strategies and making sure that we're doing it in a way that is equitable.

And then as far as the grant funding, yeah.

Um we are, I think, not getting into the details on services and supplies side of things today, but what I will say is we were very, very thoughtful about the balance between how our budget is allocating towards our personnel versus other.

And so, yes, we will continue.

I mean, you saw from my presentation, one of our big priorities is to continue to deliver dollars out into the community.

Okay, so no word if that's up or down.

Um, I think that will be coming out when we when the budget comes out on the 15th.

I think our goal, councilwoman, is to increase the percentage of dollars that go out in the community as opposed to percentage of the dollars that are used for overhead internal in our department.

Some of our departments do a lot of grant making, and so we would like to uh balance like many foundations do to say the priority should be as many dollars out the door to community as possible with lower amounts of dollars spent internally.

So that's the ratio we'll try to increase.

Okay, and then for office of children's affairs, the same question around the grants, but I also didn't see anything in the slide about youth violence prevention or tasty food, and I think one of the concerns we have is just the root causes of crime and how that um flows up.

And so I'm curious what your thoughts are there.

Yeah, thank you so much for for raising that.

Uh, first to answer the question around uh grant funding.

Um, as Aaron just said, and the mayor are our budget is not finalized.

The intention is to make sure that uh we are maximizing every dollar that can go out the door.

So the ratio of dollars that are staying in versus going out will look different moving forward than they have.

Um, so I don't know.

I can't answer a specific dollar amounts, um, but yes to what the mayor just said.

Um, secondly, I uh missed this in the presentation that I was giving before.

Um, but those are two really important programs to uh to OCA and to the city.

So the Tasty Food Program, which is a program that uh provides free meals to children that are three years old to 18 years old, has lived in OCA for the past 10 years.

Through this process of being able to think about where are there efficiencies that we can realize based off of uh already occurring infrastructure in the city.

DDPAG houses all of the food and security work and has a team of people that support that work.

And so through our conversations, we were able to understand that some of the administrative infrastructure that they have in place to issue RFPs, to manage contracts.

Actually are in place.

So TC Food Program is going to move over to DDPHE with continued very strong collaboration with OCA, obviously, because we have the we serve the primary demographic at which that program is aimed at, but they will benefit from the infrastructure that's in place in DDPG.

Similarly, with youth violence prevention, really critically important work.

We know that the Office of Social Equity Equity and Innovation and the Office of Neighborhood Safety have a whole gamut of different programs and services that provide intervention for kids at different places, kids and youth and young adults at different places in their kind of growth.

And so youth violence prevention is gonna move over to the Office of Social Equity and Innovation again with very continued close collaboration between OCA and YVP, but they will also benefit from some of that internal infrastructure that already exists with those ongoing programs.

Okay, and then the last thing is just um the supports for teachers and young child care providers and doula programs that support moms.

Are where are those going to be?

Yep, so all of our prenatal support and even one year after birth, so prenatal through one, that program has lived in DDPHE.

We were very fortunate during ARPA to be able to stand up some additional programming that supported um the training for additional doulas, but that program still remains in DDPHE and will continue forward and then say the second one for um child care providers.

For child care providers, yeah.

So we continue, we need to do work with all of our family friend and neighbor care providers.

We have really strong partners that train and support FFN providers.

We're also um partnering, as I said, closely with Denver Preschool Program and other uh large providers in Denver to think about how we can expand that support to FFN providers in a more structural way.

I just want to know we have four other folks in the queue, and so we'll try to get through them.

If we can't get all the questions answered, we'll certainly be able to get them incorporated to the briefings.

We want to make sure we get through.

We have two action items in committee that so just we might actually just get your questions out.

I think we'll follow up offline if we need to.

So I have uh President Rotem, and then I have Councilman Watson, Hans, and Sandra.

Okay, I'll just go very quickly.

Um, thank you for taking the time to come and present and talk about the organizational structure.

I think very important to always think about the end user, our residents, um, and I heard that as how you were talking about the reorganization, and I think um leadership is very difficult in also saying this is how we reorganize what this is how we streamline programs or consolidate programs for efficiencies.

Um, so I look forward to seeing what comes out of that or how it all uh rolls out.

Uh will we have access to the slides?

I was like, Yeah, thank you.

All these slides are gonna be updated legislators, they're all on Legistar as soon as this meeting's over.

Maybe they're on now.

Okay.

Um, one of the points in each one of your organizational charts talked about communication and it was you had a communications type of outreach.

What I'm wondering is is within that communications, is that your outreach component is outreach embedded in the different programs?

What does that look like and how do we make sure that that the vision of what is to come is actually able to be implemented with some of those direct community supports?

And then lastly, did I miss it?

And this is more for arts and venues, the convention center.

Did I I just might have missed it in your presentation?

I just stood on my slide.

We oversee the contracts for the convention there.

An incredibly important asset.

So I don't know how that happened, but it is a big part of our work.

Okay, so it's staying with our.

I wasn't sure it wasn't there, and I was just wondering where it was gonna sit.

The operations and the food and beverage contracts, and we're closely with Visit Dunver, so thank you for that.

To my team watching on channel eight, my bad.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you.

Um, I'll be very quick.

Um, three questions I'll be asking pretty much everyone and no answers necessary is um, and I think you answered most of you answered these in pretty much almost this order.

Um, what are the strategic decisions you uh did you make to meet the current budget limitations?

Um, how are these decisions impacting future capacity management and your ability to execute on the goals of your department?

And finally the peak performance um work efficiencies, ensuring that equity um it ties through.

I heard some of those things, and when we have a one-one briefings, we'll have those dialogues.

So, really thank you all for your thoughtful, intentional um brief presentation.

I look forward to the full present dial.

Thank you very much.

Councilman, yeah.

Thank you, Mayor.

Um as as most of you know, my uh entire career uh has been in the private um sector, except for this job, and um uh and I did a lot of work in financial planning analysis.

You can run the numbers all day.

What makes or breaks uh change is the change management?

And uh, and so I like Councilmember Watson's uh questions.

I would add one to that, and that's how are we managing the change, and this is for the mayor as well.

You know, how are we managing change?

Um, you know, as a private uh business, you can just fail, and the share shareholders um are uh are the ones who uh lose, but Denver can't fail.

We've we can't not um you know serve the other people of Denver.

So um that's the difference between private industry and government, and so how are we managing change?

And some of that is to Council Torres' point and the mayor's point about uh you know Peak Academy, but um, you know, some of these are pretty major changes, and so how are we making sure that our employees are communicated, informed in a transparent manner?

I think is uh is is really important.

So I would um I would encourage, in addition to the questions that Councilmember Watson asked, how are we managing that change and how are we gonna do this in a way that's transparent that that values the employees and make sure that they realize that they're part of a new normal that that makes sense?

Thank you, Councilman Hines, for the question and for the fantastic mustache as well.

Um President, you have the closing comments or questions.

So thank you.

Um I'll just have I have questions to probably Gretchen for um office of special events, but I could just reach out to you.

Um I'll also have questions for the office of probably all of you.

Um, but I just want to say I've been telling the mayor this idea that we have such subject matter experts in the city, and I just hope that as we talk about change, how are you leveraging them?

Um I understand that a lot of that falls on the executive director, but with the people who are still here at the city and dedicated, how are we making sure that we're leveraging the subject matter experts that we have in integrating them?

Because you have to, as we all know, to have change, you have to have buy-in from the change, right?

It's similar to um graffiti in a neighborhood.

If you do if you get the kids and the youth, and you actually put up a mural that's ownership from them, it ends up not being tagged.

And so just hope that you all do that within your organizations.

Um, some of this, especially for you, Dottie.

Um, Department of Transportation Infrastructure.

We have charter responsibilities that are governed in under that.

And so I think it would be helpful as you're communicating this out during the budget process.

What are those charter responsibilities?

Because those just have to, they cannot not be met.

Not that you all don't other else have charter responsibilities, but we have the responsibility to fund the um civil service.

We do.

We have to fund civil service.

We have to fund, make sure, fund at what, right?

And I think that there's some authority underneath the charter for all agencies.

So just would be interested as we're going through the budget process to highlight those so that our constituents know because the charter is like our constitution, and not everyone knows what a charter is.

So I always compare it to our constitution, that those can't be changed unless it's a vote by the people, and so to make sure that those are and what your missions are, I think would also be helpful because each agency has a mission, and how are you as a team fulfilling those missions?

So just hope that you really utilize the subject matter expertise that we have because we have an abundance of that endeavor.

Thank you, Mayor.

Thank you so much, CAD members for being here for your presentation.

Thanks so much, Council members for your great questions.

We are adjourned, we'll get you off to committee happy Tuesday, y'all.

Thank you.