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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.

Um then uh the second group is building plan review and inspections.

This is exactly what you would think.

These are the folks that look at construction documents and proposals for new projects that are coming in for permit and that get approved, and then what during construction, there's an inspections process, right?

That we're folks where our inspectors go in and confirm that people built what they said they were gonna build the way our code requires them to be built, and then zoning, permitting and inspection.

This is uh zoning permits because before you can get a building permit, you have to get a make sure that it's the right use and the and and that our zoning map allows that use and that on that particular parcel, and then zoning uh neighborhood inspection services is there as well for nuisance pro nuisance problems in the city, overgrown vegetation, those kinds of things.

That's all under the development services umbrella.

Planning and operation, the biggest component is our planning services, planning and policy.

That's where everything happens from uh zoning language amendments to neighborhood uh neighborhood plans to legislative rezonings, all those kinds of things happen under planning and policy to our largest plans like Blueprint Denver and our comprehensive plan.

The operations group is exactly what you would think.

That's accounting, that is all of the operations for our hard goods, things that are in our services contracts that manages all that in that group, and then public affairs and communications.

As we looked at those groups and where to make cuts, we we had 55 vacant positions to start with.

So we had 310 positions, 55 of them were vacant.

We we wanted to prioritize obviously vacant positions over filled positions where we could, but also not at the expense of, am I taking too long?

Okay, you throw something at me.

I'm close to done.

Um we wanted to prioritize those vacant positions, but not at the expense of the overall functionality of the entire organization across the across the org chart.

So in we we see that there's good volume coming in on our on the development services side.

We we are we are working on about to embark on two neighborhood uh plans under the neighborhood planning initiative, Southwest and Park Hill.

Uh, that is one of the places, and I've spoken to council president Sandoval about this.

One of the places where we're gonna where we're gonna have less capacity than we had before, whereas where we have been doing three concurrent neighborhood plans uh up to this point, and we'll be we'll be still doing three, but they'll be staggered.

Uh so there'll be two concurrent uh neighborhood plans.

We made pretty substantial cuts in our operations group, looking for places where that can be uh leveraged and made more efficient, uh working with other city-wide uh operations uh organizations and groups.

Same with public affairs and communications.

We made significant cuts there.

Uh and um, so maybe jump to the next slide now, and you can see.

So this is the blue are the positions that were retained, either uh filled positions or vacant positions that were retained, and the red brownish-red color are positions that were eliminated.

We eliminated 59 of 310 positions, 19 of those were filled, and 40 of those were vacant.

I think I'll pause there and see if there's any questions, and happy to answer.

Yes, I have them.

So, how does the if you go back to the other part chart?

So, for the planning and policy, and then the zoning and permitting, how does that impact the hundred and eighty day?

Like, so we created a permitting office before all of this happened, right?

And if you if there's positions, some of those 19 positions that were filled, how do we still achieve that guarantee?

I think it was the mayor had announced that we would give if we don't meet the permitting um 10,000 dollars.

So, how does that impact that?

So that's my first question that I have on my so within development services.

There are there are a whole host of folks who are associated with and embedded within CPD, their CPD staff positions, but they are part of the entire Denver permitting office structure, and those positions exist in Dotti and in parks and elsewhere, uh, and other agencies that touch the entire development review process.

Uh, those positions were all retained, and we are confident we can still hit the 180-day requirement.

Okay, so then for the zoning permitting and inspections, um, those people are usually on the ground doing construction permits and site plans, and like they're integral in getting certificate of occupancies, right?

And so as we want to make sure that we're um promoting growth to help us with the budget, how does that department because it's neighborhood inspections?

It's a right, I mean, not tiny, you don't know.

How does that impact so if I get if I have um people who are building buildings and they're saying, hey, this is part not just the time to get the permit, but the time to get the certificate of occupancies and all of that?

How does that play out?

Yeah, that's that's a great question because at the end of the project, that's one of the last reviews and approvals that's required to get a temporary certificate of occupancy.

Uh we have adequate capacity, we believe, with the volume that we're seeing right now in terms across the board for residential commercial permits coming in the door to address that need at the end of the project.

Okay, and then I think you got to my last question with the neighborhood planning initiatives.

Wendy, do those plan to kick off in the beginning of the year, like quarter one.

Like will you have how far staggered?

So you'd have two going concurrently.

How far staggered would the others be?

The other be.

I don't know that.

Can I get back to you with that?

I don't know that off the top of my head.

Okay, um I think that's it.

Thank you so much, Brad.

Great to see you, so appreciate your help.

Thanks.

Next up, we're gonna bring up Perla from Human Rights and Community Partnership.

Good morning, Council President, Sandoval and Mayor on this bright and early Tuesday morning.

Good morning.

Great to see you.

Thanks for coming.

Yep.

I am uh Pearl Gaylor with human rights and community partnerships and ready to share my updates.

Great.

Um we started this process actually before this past year.

So in 2024, we started looking at um our org chart and looking at where we could uh combine some of the projects and and work that we do, and so I think what you'll see today is some of that work that's been done over the last year and a half and not just the last couple of months.

Um we wanted to connect and align work by reducing silos with nine offices and nine directors.

Um it was a pretty daunting thing to walk into.

Everybody had like their own little office, and you know, who's talking to who within our department, and so we wanted to reimagine with purpose so that we could deliver more integrated solutions on how we could provide for our community.

We identified inefficiencies in financial and administrative processes that we've been working on for the last year and a half, and we're preserving and maximizing funding directly into the community because we believe that's where we need the more, the more support.

Um, so our strategic alignment is with uh four divisions and and our citywide departments where we act as support work for some of the other larger departments.

We want to protect and provide core services.

So our focus on the highest impact work was one that we had heard is elevating our aging voice as the demographics in this community are growing, and by 2050, we know that our aging population will outnumber our children, which is zero to 18 for the first time in US history, and so how do we build the infrastructure uh to support our aging population that's living in poverty?

We also wanted to empower our community.

You'll see with the new division of community empowerment.

We want to command um empower our community with resources to impact their financial self-sufficiency and also integrating into the community if they're not from Denver.

We want to explore opportunities for technology solutions.

Like we have with our snow angels programs, we believe that there's some work that we could be doing on intake processes, and so we're looking at some of that work, which we'll get into the slides later, and then we're maintaining existing programs for continuity of essential services.

So, what are those essential services that we have always provided, and how do we continue to do that well?

And then, of course, just as CPD mentioned, we eliminated our vacant positions first.

If you look at the slide, you'll see nine different offices plus 10 um commissions that we oversee.

That's a lot of um a lot of work being done in the community, but as you see, there was some equities across our agency.

So some of the offices had staff, some of the office didn't have staff, and how could we you know bring some equity within our office so that we can all do the work together and also have financial stability within every single uh division that we offer?

If you go to the last slide, you'll see where we have finessed some of this work.

We combined our access for all division, which includes disability rights, it includes deaf and hard of hearing and includes anti-discrimination.

We just finished our DOJ settlement from the last eight years at 92% approval.

So we're moving in the right direction, and we know that our staff are ready to one look at ADA barriers, to make sure that we don't get lost with our deaf and hard of hearing services, which has just done amazing work over the last 40 years.

This was also made because we have someone retiring at the end of the year who has been with the city for um almost 40 years, and so when that person retires, we'll be hiring a new director to oversee all the all the streamlines in that work, deaf and hard of hearing disability rights and anti-discrimination.

We kept intact our immigrant and refugee affairs, and we also have our community empowerment, which we will post the job description for on September 15th when our hiring freezes over.

And then we have our aging and financial well-being where we combined our financial empowerment, our consumer fraud, consumer financial protection, and our aging division.

We also have a retirement in that uh division, so we are going with one director to oversee three areas as well, and of course, we still kept our 10 commissions that we will continue to work with in the way that we have.

Any questions for HRCP?

Yeah, pro for being here.

Good morning, good morning, good morning, Senator Gonzalez Gutierrez, one of the council members at large.

Just a real quick question, and then if you have council president, um where is the slide decks for these?

Because I looked on Legislatar and I don't see anything there.

It will be uploaded after.

Can I get it now though?

Because I didn't get to get here in time to see all of this.

If I and it's hard to see on the screen, thank you.

So once you have an opportunity, I'll ask them questions while you can speak up.

So remind me what BOA means.

Oh, business um office administration.

So that's my assistant.

That's yours, okay.

I share her with the deputy, and she actually does a lot of projects within the city, so then CPD that's board of adjustments.

I was like, wait, what's going on here?

Okay, so in this new or compared to the old art or structure, in this new one, each commission had its own director, correct?

It had a staff liaison.

Had a staff liaison.

How does it work now?

We are looking at um right now through the end of the year, Victoria and I will be jumping in where we don't have a staff liaison to keep some consistency, and then we will be reassigning where we have a vacancy for a staff liaison to a commission.

We want them to shadow us at the meetings and see what the process is before just assigning them to a commission.

So out of the 10 HRCP commissions, how many have a liaison right now?

Um four.

And so I'll be working with the Denver Women's Commission, for example, and the LGBTQ because they don't have a staff.

So I'll be working with them.

Okay, and then if you could go back to the keep going.

Okay, so this one, when it says focus on highest impact work, what does that mean?

So, for example, um right now, our financial empowerment works very closely with nonprofits like Warren Village or Sea Housing, and what we try to do is coach those families into an apartment and a job that pays well, and we look at their credit score and how they can budget, and so we're getting them into more stable housing and then opening up a spot for somebody that might need housing that may could be living in their car.

So we're making sure that we are not adding to the homeless structure, but also um coaching, financial coaching to those that may need some little more help on budgeting and how to find a better paying job, how to you know get into apartment that is not um their entire paycheck.

So we're really working with those nonprofits to support our community uh living in poverty.

Thank you.

And then on the third bullet point on the top one preserve and maximize funding, where due to our budget um lack of budget, where is that funding coming from?

Are we is it grants?

Are we still getting grants?

Do we still have how many grants are we giving, like just break that down for me a little bit more?

We have um mini grants that go into the community from our immigrant and refugee affairs, and I think we did uh 10 of those um this past year, and so we will continue to do some of the mini grants.

We also do some uh grants in our aging where we sponsor a lot of booths so we're out in the community sharing with people all the resources that we have.

So our aging will age in place.

Okay, and then explore opportunity for technology solutions.

So I understand that, and at the same time, you have the Office of Aging, so and sometimes that doesn't always go well with our older active adults.

How does the how do those two work together?

So when I said explore opportunities for technology solutions, I meant for example, we're using anti-discrimination intake and in a digitized form.

So when someone files a complaint, it goes through different edits of um or different pings of if it's not in our jurisdiction, that person filing the claim would get a letter that says, sorry, this is not in our jurisdiction.

Here are some other resources.

Um, if it is here, answer these additional questions, and a staff member will get back with you to understand your claim.

Um, when I talk about aging, so we did multiple trainings over the last five years with uh our aging population, where we taught how to use how to sign up for a Gmail, how to look at spams and frauds and what not to open and how to order prescriptions online, how to order food online because we know they were the most impacted during COVID, and so we will actually we're looking at doing that again, but doing it with youth, and so we're doing an intergenerational piece with youth and our aging population.

Okay, councilman or Gonzalez could be do you have any questions?

Um I guess one question, and I know um just kind of understanding uh thank you for being here, Perla.

Um, the kind of the original I guess intent with HRCP was to be you know more active in the community to be making those connections for people from our diverse populations right in all aspects of that word.

Um is there is there anything that you all are looking at during this restructure time to um to meet that need, especially as we are as we're going into what we're going into with a lot of the cuts and things that are happening across the board, right?

From the federal level down to us at the local level, knowing that people are are probably gonna need people in the community working with them on the ground more than ever.

I think you know what is at the foundation of our department is human rights and also community partnerships.

We are not just striving to make sure that everyone is um has access to the resources that we provide, but also that we utilize our community to help us with that access.

Um we continue to work with all our nonprofit partners, we continue to provide those services.

But I think one example that I can give you that really answers your question, we know that a lot of the residents we work with will be impacted by uh food insecurity, especially with SNAP, and how they are lowering or changing their method of providing SNAP.

So we've been working with Denver Human Services, DDPHE, and other departments to talk about what does that really look like for us?

How do we go and support neighborhoods where we believe are being most impacted through benefits like SNAP?

So are we working with uh food banks?

Are we working with uh food pantries?

And how do we support them to make sure that everyone is having access to food?

So I think we'll start seeing more of that, more task force or community work groups working together to provide where we think there's going to be some gaps.

And that we've done that through all the way through COVID and before.

So we're familiar with this kind of work, and I think just reaching out to our partners is where we're gonna find the support that we need and be able to provide those resources.

Our work is not changing.

Um we have changed a few things, like we're not doing storytelling, but we are providing a service to people who actually need a voice on financial stability, aging on what are the resources available to our aging population that's living on $700 a month.

How can we help them find the services that they need so they can not have to decide between a prescription and paying their utility bill?

Um immigrant and refugee bears, we continue to work with the community with my city academy in every single district to talk about how to integrate into community and what does that look like for their safety?

What does that look like from a legal point of view?

What does that look like for resources?

We have our immigrant and refugee uh toolkit online that we update uh regularly.

We still have our Tuesday calls with over 50 nonprofit providers every Tuesday every other Tuesday morning.

And you know, when it comes to aging, that is near and dear to my heart.

I feel like we have made a lot of progress in our aging um office here in Denver.

Um I was just at a triple A meeting with the agency area agency on aging monthly meeting where we talked for a three hours on how are we going to work with legislation to make sure that our older adults are provided for.

And so I think you're gonna see a lot of uh people rallying together to make sure that our most marginalized or most vulnerable populations continue to um reach self-sufficiency, but also thrive, you know, find a find a job that can help you pay for your rent, help you budget to save $20 every week, you know.

So those are the things that we're gonna be doing and focused on.

Thank you for all of that.

Um, so just to make sure I'm clear and I apologize, I was running a little bit late.

I didn't actually have this on my um calendar, um, like we usually do, but um, and so I had scheduled another meeting.

But regardless of that, um you talked about the the storytelling, the office of storytelling is going, that has been something that has been.

Yeah, we um so that's fine, it's it's something that's not happening right now.

And we talked, and I'm sorry to interrupt you.

Um, I know there were other council members who wanted to know why that was getting more resources than our aging.

Well, my question isn't necessarily to that, but I'm just going to the what are the things that are being impacted because of the layoffs, right?

So, what are the things that you're not going to be able to do?

And this is also councilwoman Lewis has also had this question is she wants to know what is it are the things that you stop doing due to the layoffs.

Honestly, there's we haven't stopped doing anything.

We just continue to do it with less people, but we have the resources, and as you can see from the flow chart, if you'll go back to our last flow chart, there's nothing that's skipping a B here.

We are still working with our aging population.

We are still making sure that consumer frauds or consumer financial protection is working with our people that are calling in and saying, Hey, we need help.

Um, financial empowerment is still gonna be due the financial coaching, immigrant refugees.

We're still doing our My City Academy and more.

So we just, I think you may have missed it, but access for all is disability rights.

We completed our DOJ settlement at 92% approval.

Now we will work on any other barriers, but we will work with the agencies that have been impacted the most.

And so there's like six or seven of those where we continue to work with.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, thank you, madam president.

Thank you, sir.

Thank you so much.

Uh, thank you so much, Pearl, for all of your presentation and for all your great work.

Uh, excited to bring up and introduce uh our new city librarian, Nicole Davies, who's here uh for her first appearance here before the council.

Um, but thank you so much for putting it straight in in a busy time and for your wonderful leadership uh in these first few weeks.

Welcome aboard.

Thank you.

Hello to councilwoman president and councilwoman.

Um again, I'm Nicole Davies.

I'm on week three of the job, super thrilled to be here, and I've got lots of support from my team in case there are questions that I can't answer.

I'd like to hop right into our the why of what we do.

So the library is driven by our service philosophy, and we use our strategic plan Denver here as our guide, our North Star.

The values in our plan outline our service goals and then are therefore reflected in our budget.

Prior to the current financial situation, our team had done the work to define our desired impact on the community, identify all the unique lines of service that only the Denver Public Library can offer, and then develop operational metrics that are necessary to help evaluate and continually improve our ability to deliver our outcomes.

Our core services are the things that our library is uniquely positioned to do in the community, and they are collections, a vast collection of materials and information on a wide variety of subjects in multiple formats and multiple languages, tech and internet, technology and internet access that allow people to connect and create spaces, spaces across Denver that provide easy access to services and resources, and then are probably our most invaluable resources our staff, skilled staff, skilled staff trained in welcoming all, helping people use our resources, providing meaningful experiences, and facilitating connections.

Move on to the next slide.

So actually, this work began in 2023.

The library embarked on reimagining the organizational structure with the primary objectives of building capacity to execute on its strategic priorities.

So this restructuring has been phased and still continues today.

This org chart that you see here reflects the prior organizational structure, an unintended consequence of which we often saw siloed work and missed opportunities for innovation and collaboration.

You'll see in the next org chart, which is our current structure, it reflects our current structure, and we're beginning to realize the value it provides in meeting our strategic plan objectives.

And you'll see that we took it down from several different direct reports into the city librarian, which again created silos to three areas of strategy under these uh chief officer positions.

With the chief operations officer, we consolidated procurement, finance, safety, security, and technology with our chief equity and strategy officer.

We again have process improvement, human relations, communications, and um diversity, equity, accessibility, and then under our chief public services, we are able to put all of our brand services and public service housed in one location.

I'm happy to take questions.

Yeah, Madam President, or Captain Gonzalez.

Okay, so if you go back to the original org chart, where did so the green?

How did they it for me as someone who's a visual learner?

It'd be great to see those if you go back to the current org chart, where they landed.

Does that make sense?

So um, because I understand I I think I've met maybe all three of the I meant, I think I've met all three of the um under you right now, but I just don't I understand kind of how their roles are, but who, so for instance, who would be watching the bond process as it comes out?

Which of those three does the bond how does the bond fall under?

I feel like in some ways the bond is under all on our operations mode.

Sure.

Okay.

Off all facilities and planning as well.

Okay.

And so with the facilities, are you all doing um an assessment, like more of a robust assessment of needs for the facilities so that we can.

I feel like last year during budget season, we've heard that Montvalor library had been shut down.

I wasn't aware that that had happened.

So I just feel like we need to have a so just it would be it would with this structure.

I love the current.

I just need even more granularity of how do all of the programming at the libraries that are constituent, who do they go up to?

So then if we have issues, it's easy for me to email both of you so that it's all eyes on there, but without that, I don't know how the the which teams which person is in charge of which teams.

Does that make sense?

Sure.

And with Chief Public Services Officers Officer, um, that's Teresa, she's not with us this morning.

Um, that will be all public programming, all public-facing programming, library programs, library branches for the customer's experience is going to be on that side of the house.

Okay.

So branch services, um, will is absolutely gonna be focused on facilities, procurement, the finance component of it, safety, security.

So again, direct public service, but more of the behind the scenes.

And then remind me with the layout.

Did you have to lay off staff to get to this orchard?

We don't have layoffs, but we reduced positions by how many?

99.

And part of the way we were able to achieve that is that we have four library branches that through a bond in 2017.

Um, we have an obligation to take four branches offline for renovations that came out of a 2017 bond.

So we will be shifting those staff that we currently have in those branches while they're not doing direct public service in their current spaces.

We will be bringing in them into other spaces to be doing that work.

Right, remind me which branches those are.

Sure.

We have Broadway, University Hills, Field, and Hamden.

So in it.

Field.

Field.

So in addition to that, while we redeploy those staff into other branches, we'll also be propping up services in those communities, both mobile, figuring out other drop points for collections, holds, things like that, food box distribution.

We'll be working with community partners to ensure those services are still happening.

We'll supplement with mobile services and partnering up with again different entities to make sure we can continue to provide library services, and then in addition to that, we've been able to expand hours and days and some of the surrounding branches again to try and meet the needs of those communities while their branches are offline.

Okay, um and then your book mobile is that still going?

Okay, awesome.

We have robust mobile services.

Okay, so needed.

Um I think that's all I have right now.

Council.

Thank you.

Um council president, mayor.

Um, so for um, I'm gonna ask the same question because councilman lives asked that I asked the same question.

But knowing that your situation's a little bit different and that you didn't actually lay anybody off, but that um you are not filling, you reduce the nine positions by 99.

Um with that said, and so I'm hearing there are four libraries that are going offline, shifting the staff.

Um, are there other things that will be impacted due to this shift?

Well, I are there things that you won't be able to continue to do, I should say, um, that you'll have to stop doing as a result of this.

I think it's gonna be more about us looking at obviously that didn't close the entire gap of what we needed.

So as we start to look at how do we find those savings elsewhere with gap closures, it is looking at some of the redundancies with technology, where can we streamline processes?

Um we're looking at a lot of um continuous uh improvement services again where we can find efficiencies.

Our prime our primary focus, of course, was to also look at ensuring that we were able to maintain as many positions as possible.

I think it's also gonna be looking at long-term staffing structures and things like that down the road, but I think this helped to get us there now.

I think we also have a lot of subscription services that we're analyzing usage of.

We're looking at the data to help inform our decisions.

Anything else we should add to that?

I can, yeah, please add a little bit of responsibility.

Hi, everyone.

My name's false.

Yeah.

Uh Colbert, I am the chief equity and strategy officer.

Um, so our leadership team that makes up of our directors, we're tasked with looking at each of their subdivisions to identify where they can find efficiencies and where we can do better without with the least amount of impact.

We ran that through kind of an equity rubric.

We looked at impact to the community, and we also looked at alignment with our strategic plan.

One of the things that we talked about, and I think Nicole just mentioned regarding databases, we wanted to make sure we are not impacting our most vulnerable populations.

So like tutor.com for our children, we will be maintaining that.

And our citizenship report uh support, so for immigrants and and newcomers.

Um, we're looking at our collections, right?

So when you think about ebooks versus physical collections, ebooks are incredibly expensive, and licensing only lasts for so so long.

So where we can reduce our ratios, where we can limit holds without impacting the experience is going to net us hundreds of thousands of dollars.

So it sounds like there's still some evaluation process happening to determine what things might have to go away, is what I'm hearing.

Because you it sounds like you're still looking at databases, you're still looking at some of this information, or has that already been all determined?

So the ones that we are moving forward with around two million plus dollars, we are going to be implementing, and we've started that process right now.

Okay.

What we did find in this process was that we have additional things that we could we could continue to look at.

So this will be an ongoing process for efficiencies.

Okay.

So then that two million that comes from the reducing the 99 positions and the four branches going offline, and what else?

I think those are separate, just to I think those are separate uh budgetary savings they're looking at.

Just to reframe, we won't have all the final dollars and cents until the full budget book is closed.

We weren't asking to present today on any line item cuts.

It was more about what's the structural changes around personnel at scale, those foreclosures in 99.

And so I don't I don't think that um we're at asking yet on specifics on individual line item cuts, but I think those are another services reduction that they were describing that would be in the full budget book briefing, we'll be doing for you next week.

Okay, yeah, I was just trying to get a better understanding of what are the things that will no longer be available because of the changes in budget that have.

And we can keep you updated on that.

Okay, absolutely.

That would be great.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, Councilman.

Um, all right, with no further questions.

I have one we're gonna use, Madam President.

But for CPV, sorry.

And we're bringing you can bring Brad right back up.

You all can stay there, library team, you know if you're anywhere in case you're an extra question.

Brad, it's just back up.

Sorry, Brad, I was going through my notes.

Um, so I have a question.

Um, with neighborhood planning initiatives, not moving off three concurrently.

How do we deal with any of the like ADUs?

It was mandated by the state.

It was the parking minimums were mandated by the state.

I think there's a couple one more, two more initiatives.

Single stair, yeah, single stair mandated by the state.

Thank you.

I'm one of the ones working on that.

I should have known.

And I think that there might be one more.

I can't remember.

How do we?

How do we um how do we work with our partners at the state to make sure to let them know that yes, you are mandating these initiatives on us?

Like right now, the outstanding one that I keep thinking about is the ADU, right?

And we rezoned our whole entire city.

We're the first one in the state to do it.

I rezoned my whole entire council district before everyone even did it, and now because of a setback, we're not getting possibly access to a pot of money, but we have been good partners.

So, how do we navigate that territory as we're rethinking um CPD?

And yet, this date continues to mandate certain things that we have to become compliant with.

Does that make sense?

Yep, absolutely.

And with the things that we know right now, we we will maintain that we have the capacity to do that work.

If something else comes out that we're not aware of right now, we'd have to look at that, but we have the capacity to accomplish those things now.

Okay, so we'll just have to follow this date this session really closely.

I have my councilwoman who's appointed to that working group here with me to see how does that impact us because I high, you know, that parking minimum that was a lot that is a huge that was a huge process for the city and your staff and doctors.

That actually saves us time.

I mean, I can't tell you how many hours we spend telling folks how many parking spaces or confirming their calculations on how many parking spaces they need.

That's something we don't do anymore.

That actually saved us time.

Okay.

So even though it put time on the front end on the back end, you can say that, like in the equation of hours spent for city staff, it will actually save us time as we move forward.

Okay, that makes sense.

Okay, sorry about that.

Thank you.

That was my last question.

I'm so sorry, Brad, that I missed your presentation.

You meant really fast, but I was racing here, not not too fast.

I was going to say, but I'm just looking at the short presentation here, and just a quick question about um, well, one, I need to ask the question I need to ask that I asked everybody for for councilwoman Lewis, which was um essentially, you know, what are the things that um that are as a result of the layoffs?

Um, what are the things that your agency will no longer be able to do?

There's nothing that we will stop doing that we don't intentionally want to stop doing.

We have been looking at systems improvements, uh, a lot of things.

We have a just stop it list with over a hundred items on it right now, uh really engaged all of our teams and our managers and supervisors to look at what what are the things we're doing that are either no longer create, you know, make creating value for implementation of our mission vision of our plans for the city or serving our customers.

There were a lot of those, and so uh, and things like the parking minimum requirement going away.

There are many other places where we have have savings.

The places that uh there so there's nothing we're gonna not do anymore, some of it is going to not happen as fast.

Neighborhood planning initiative, which would started the last time I was here in this position.

We set out and and originally it was designed to do two concurrent neighborhood plans before it actually started, it was ramped up to three.

We'll be going back to two concurrent plans.

That third one will get staggered a little bit, which I will tell you also.

I don't think folks are gonna really notice that because they've always just naturally staggered, they don't all commence on the same day and finish on the same day.

So that stagger will just have to be assessed based on what staff resources we have for for those NPI um plans, okay.

Thank you.

Um, and then my second thing.

So you have on here, oh I lost it.

Let me grab it back up.

Oh, there it is.

Okay, so um, the the piece about um looking at uh yeah, innovations and efficiencies.

So are we are you open to ideas?

Absolutely.

Absolutely, we're taking them from from all directions.

Um, you know, what one thing we found is that we have uh found uh that the city has such great GIS information about uh all of our addresses.

We're we've we've found a software platform and we're uh soft launching it right now that will help our inspectors route their day more efficiently.

Uh we're seeing it, and and this sounds too good to be true, but it it is true.

We're seeing over 30% time savings in just drive time, and so that is reducing carbon emissions.

It's it's less uh wear and tear on vehicles, and our inspectors are getting through their routes more efficiently.

So there, and there are many, many places that we're able to do it.

Do you have some ideas you would like to guess?

Well, I mean, I think one thing I and I could talk to you offline about it, but is like the ADU um piece and having like a template, and I think we've seen things happen like in Montrose and other jurisdictions where they have a template and it does save home it saves people who are you know, they're a homeowner and they're trying to build an ADU, it saves them time um and money from having to like go through this long process each and every single time.

So having kind of a format that that's ready to go form.

And I know uh Renee Martinez Stone um has done a lot of work with that as well.

I know they created some templates, but it's not accessible to everybody.

Right, understood.

Yeah, yeah, I think it's a great suggestion.

Okay.

I don't think I have any more questions.

Thank you.

Great.

Uh thank you so much, members of council.

Thank you so much to our wonderful agency heads who are willing to come and thank you for your presentation.

We will have these online for any other council members in the public who want to be able to look at them.

So thank you, and we are adjourned.

Thank you.

Um,