Thanks for 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.

It seems like are we live now and ready to go?

But yeah, that green on air button doesn't mean that we're on air and means we're being recorded.

On air recording.

Okay.

Um, good morning, everybody.

Great to see you.

Uh, thank you so much for being here on the day after Labor Day.

Delighted to have folks here.

We are uh recording this right now.

We had some technical difficulties about getting it up live.

If you're not seeing it live, uh, we'll be out to the public on um a recording, but we will figure out how to get that done.

Um, and thank you to Councilman Alvidres and the president who are here.

We have a number of council members who are doing this virtually um this week while all the city offices are open.

Um, the council is not in session for meetings this week, and so it's not a traditionally scheduled council meeting.

We it is still, city's still open and functioning, and so the president and I are still meeting and others are still moving, and so we wanted to continue these uh briefings for uh members of the council members of the public who wanted to learn more about what was happening around some of our department restructures, and so we kept those on the list this morning.

We'll do a quick round of introductions.

We'll jump into briefing.

Um, for folks to see now and or later.

Well, it's just me, and um, I do have to go to a doctor's appointment.

It's really hard to schedule children's appointments, but I wanted to come to make sure that you all know that your departments are very important to us.

And it's unfortunate that it was scheduled this week, and I do have to get to my son's doctor's appointment.

So thank you.

Thank you, Councilman.

Councilman.

Coming and going.

Councilman Amanda Sandoval on Reckless Ember District One.

Uh, great.

Uh, well, thank you all so much for being here.

We're gonna jump straight into the briefing so we can get those up and rolling and have those on record.

Uh so uh I will start by introducing our team from community planning development.

Brad, you want to come up and love to have you engage.

Good morning.

Good morning.

Good to see you.

Thanks for being here.

It is your show.

You bet.

So let's jump to the first slide.

This is really the overview of how do we look at these cuts strategically.

We knew what level of cuts we needed to make.

The question was where and how.

And I think the strategy was one from the highest altitude, looking at the entire organization, everything that community planning and development does.

And I think folks think that it's it's about planning and planning services, and that is a very significant component, but it's also about all the development services side, everything that has to do with investment in our city, which is the implementation of the mission and vision that we set forth in those plans.

And so the organization after our reduction still needed to provide all of our core services.

We needed to address all of the catalytic projects that are coming up, projects like the soccer project, the new Park Hill Park and uh potential Broncos Stadium.

We need to address our neighborhood planning services.

We need to address all the hundreds and hundreds of permits that come in every single day from small new electrical panels and roof projects and solar installations to large projects downtown.

We need to support things like the downtown development authority, and the adaptive reuse that's gonna happen downtown and the reinvestment in downtown that we're seeing, the activation of 16th Street, all those things are core services.

We also have a commitment to maintaining and hitting our 180-day permitting timeline.

We have commitments that we that are uh and requirements for Prop 123 around uh housing timelines and all those things uh along with uh process improvements and and elements of right the regulatory environment that we we want to stop doing because they may have been there and for a long time but have not been reassessed recently in terms of what we do and how we do it.

So we backed up and really use this as a strategic implementation plan, not just looking at the org chart, but what do we do, where do we do it, how do we do it, what are things that we can stop doing, what are the critical things kind of in this point in time that are highest priority, and how do we continue to maintain that level of service for all of our customers, both uh you know city council, the residents of Denver, the investors in Denver, homeowners in Denver, uh, all of the folks that interact with community planning and development.

So uh on the why, we focused on those core services again, looking at the entire organization, the catalytic project, minimizing impacts to customers that interact with community planning and development, and using this as an opportunity to streamline look for innovations uh throughout throughout the entire uh process.

Next slide, please.

So, this is uh an overview of community planning and development.

There are two general components uh planning and operations, development services.

Development services includes site design and neighborhood development, which is site development plan.

These are sort of large projects, uh larger site projects, everything from a large housing project to a new soccer stadium and everything in between.