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Welcome to Mayor Council. Thank you so much for being here.

We will start with some introductions. Back in black, the distinguished gentleman to my right.

You can start us off.

Thank you, Mayor.

Good morning, all castles from the South, Denver District 6 in the house.

Oh, I'm so excited.

I'm ready.

She's backers off the coffee.

Good morning, everyone.

Serena Gonzalez-Cuperas, one of you at large.

Good morning, Amanda Sawyer, District 5.

Laura Vibras, Lucky District 7.

Good morning, Gary Watson, Fine District 9.

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

Jamie Torres, West Denver, District 3.

Good morning, Amanda Sandville, Northwest Denver, District 1.

Wonderful to see you all. Thanks so much for being here. We have an exciting general session as well as an executive session on the calendar today. I'd love to start with announcements. Are there any announcements from Councilmembers? Councilwoman Albedrez, Sawyer, move right down the line.

Great. We're having constituent hours this week, Friday, lucky Friday the 13th from 1 to 2.30 at Athmar Park Library. Catch us there and come talk to us if there's anything going on.

Just a reminder for everyone tonight, 5.30 p.m. George Washington High School Library is our annual District 5 Community Open House.

So please come and join us. Councilwoman Gonzalez Gutierrez and her staff will be there as well.

The mayor's office will be there and a number of different city agencies.

So just an opportunity for residents to come and talk to the people who are actually implementing the work in our district and ask all your questions.

George Washington High School.

And then through the north.

Thank you so much, Councilman Sawyer.

Other announcements?

Councilman Watson.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

Just wanted to thank the family and community for coming out this past weekend for Dr. Daddio's repass and life celebration.

It was a fantastic opportunity to say, you know, thank you to the history that he made.

for folks that didn't know that Dr. Daddio was the owner of the first black radio station

that began right at Five Points.

He also was a griot, and what that means is that he also told stories

of the legacy and history of the African-American community.

There are hundreds of folks that were there.

Thank you to Cleo Parker Robinson Dance for the repass,

for allowing us to have the event there.

And so thank you all for being there, and thank you for all the good work

that Dr. DiDio did for our communities.

It was good to see the mayor there as well.

Thank you, Councilman, for your great comments at that ceremony.

Fascinating.

He ran the first black-owned radio station west of the Mississippi.

West of the Mississippi.

Remarkable, right here in Denver.

Very, very proud story.

Also the best voice for radio.

Any other announcements for folks?

Okay, well, we're excited for our general session this morning

to talk a little bit about our registered neighborhood organizations

and opportunities to help support and improve them.

This effort has really been led tremendously by two of our council members,

Councilman Washington, Councilman Cashman, and so I'm going to give it over to the two of you.

Yeah, it was like a benefit.

It was like merging them all.

I'm going to give it over to the two council members

to tell us about this morning's presentation I will talk.

It's like Larry Davidson.

I need to tell you first, it's easy to tell me from Councilman Watson,

he dresses better than me.

You're wearing black today.

Yes, I am. Thank you.

Right ahead.

Go in nowhere.

Thank you for that introduction, Mayor.

This is a really exciting time and a really exciting process.

Councilman Gonzalez-Guterres and I and our teams have been very interested in empowering residents to play more of a role in their own governance.

And we think that one of the ways, you know, there is strength in numbers.

So one of the ways our residents can benefit is if our registered neighborhood organizations function better.

And, you know, the organization creating the structure, the ordinance creating the structure was crafted in the late 1970s and has not been strengthened since that time.

And so over the past eight months or so, our teams have done a really incredible amount of outreach, talking to R&O leadership, talking to the average everyday Denverite about their position in the R&O scheme.

And so where we're at now is they've assembled an incredible amount of data that will help us in the discussion moving forward.

So I think what we want to, with Sina and Masha will tell us about today, where we are and what we see as next steps to continuing figuring out how we want to move forward with a stronger RNO structure.

Yeah, I'll just add, not to be confused with Councilman Cashman, but this work has been

going almost, it's almost been, we're rounding up almost to a year at this point of all of

the information gathering phase.

And we thought, you know, we made the request to bring it to mayor council because we thought

it would be a great opportunity to get it in front of our colleagues as well as in front

of the administration and also for the public to be able to see where we are right now in

the process and get those updates.

Nothing has been determined.

We're still in the midst of this, and we're looking forward to what those next steps are,

and some of that will involve reengagement with community and doing that follow-up work

to then determine what is going to happen next as far as it goes for an ordinance.

So with that, I'm going to stop talking and I'm going to turn it over to our amazing team

who has done so much work.

This has been such a huge lift, but they have really risen to the occasion.

And I'm super proud of the work that they have all done, all of our council aides in

both of our offices.

So with that, I'll pass it to you all.

Thanks so much, council members.

Good morning, everyone.

My name is Masha Lior and I am the Senior Counselor for Councilman Cashman.

And my name is Sina Jodri and I am a Senior Counselor for Councilman Gonzalez.

And I also want to acknowledge the rest of our amazing team that are City of the Economy.

Elise Bupp and Claire Kelly from Councilman Cashman's office and Emily Echua from Councilman Gonzalez Gutierrez's office.

So thank you again for joining us for our Your City, Your Voice presentation on our registered neighborhood organization engagement process.

This presentation is a recap of the work that we have done so far and the timeline of what's coming in the future.

We will refer to registered neighborhood organizations as RNOs in this presentation.

The RNO ordinance was created to improve the flow of communication between city officials and neighborhoods, but needs to be modernized.

We got lots of feedback on the problems with the current RNO system, but instead of going over all of them, here are some of the ones that we heard most often.

Neighbors feel like they aren't getting timely updates on what's happening in their communities.

As volunteer-run organizations, RNOs are overwhelmed with the amount of information they receive and struggle disseminating that information to their neighbors.

The city provides little to no support to our RNOs, including no financial, technical, or structural support.

And there's no clear guidance on what roles RNOs play in their communities, resulting in many RNOs struggling to recruit neighbors.

Our angle is to reform the RNO ordinance.

But before we do that, we wanted to engage with a wide spectrum of community,

from RNO members to people who don't normally engage with local politics or local government and have never heard of RNOs.

We wanted the community's feedback to inform us on any proposed changes we would make to the ordinance.

Throughout the entire process, we have prioritized co-designing any potential new policy with community.

Our offices have partnered with Radiant to carry out this work.

They are a Denver-based nonprofit working to enhance social equity.

They are perfect partners because of their existing experience working with RNOs

and their work writing the RNO Equity Toolkit.

Radiant has helped us design our survey, have co-hosted our regional workshops,

have hosted two engagement opportunities with our NOSE and are co-writing the report with our offices.

The next couple slides are just kind of a timeline of the work that we have done up to this point.

I'm not going to go into every single detail, but if there are any questions, we're happy to go over them.

So we kicked off our process in March of 2025 by meeting with the mayor's team

and the Office of Human Rights and Community Partnerships.

We spent the first couple months setting up the infrastructure for community outreach,

which included creating our survey and marketing materials.

To get people to file our survey, we spent the summer attending community events across the city

and sent the survey out through various social media accounts and newsletters.

Throughout this process, we continued to engage with City Council and the Mayor's Office.

In July of last year, we presented an update at the City Council Operations Meeting,

and later that fall gave a very similar update to Denver Inter-Neighborhood Cooperation,

also known as INC.

In the fall, we hosted five neighborhood engagement workshops to gather more feedback outside of our surveys and began meeting with city agencies and outside stakeholders to get their feedback on the ARDNO ordinance.

At the end of the year, we and our offices began analyzing the data from the survey and started writing the report.

I'll now pass it over to Masha to go into more detail about our engagement work.

All right, so just to dive a little bit deeper into what we were doing for the past over six months.

From May to September of last year, we attended over 40 community events, and those included different summer concerts, many of them in your district, art fairs that were thrown by community, the 16th Street and Grand Opening, which you can see a picture above, National Night Out, backpack giveaways, so partnerships with DPS and more.

We also distributed information about our work and our project and the survey to libraries, recreation centers, community centers, and local businesses.

The in-person attendance really focused on teaching community what RNOs are and their potential benefits and their function within the city to also encourage folks to participate in our survey.

And we really wanted to make sure that they were informed of our next steps.

So we also encourage people to sign up for our newsletter, and we have over 630 newsletter recipients right now, and that is definitely growing.

In total, we received 1,127 survey responses in English, Spanish, and French.

And we did have the survey translated to the top five languages in Denver.

and all of this was very important to us to make sure that we were hitting different parts of the

city during different days of the week, different times during the day. So we really tried to engage

a lot of different people throughout the city. So as Sina mentioned, in the fall we then

transitioned to more facilitated in-person conversations on R&Os. So we hosted and

facilitated four in-person neighborhood engagement workshops. We really aimed to hit all four corners

of the city, and anyone in Denver was welcome to attend the workshops, people currently involved in

their RNOs and folks that who, you know, they're not aware of what RNOs really are. And we also

hosted and facilitated a virtual neighborhood engagement workshop. We heard from people about

the current neighborhood engagement with the city, challenges that RNOs face, and discussed

opportunities to create a better system. So here's a map of everywhere that we were in the city. The

red dots are the community events that we went through over the summer, and then the pink dots

are the neighborhood engagement workshops. So we hit every single council district.

Vradian then also hosted two virtual R&O specific engagement sessions. So those were an opportunity

for R&O representatives to share their challenges and provide input on potential opportunities

and recommendations that are then going to be incorporated into the report. We also engaged

with 20 city agencies to hear their perspectives on how they currently work within the RNO system

and what could be improved. And many of those agencies are actually listed in the current

ordinance as responsible city agencies for notifications to RNOs. But we also did interviews

with other city agencies that interact with RNOs and do community engagement work outside of the

ordinance. In addition to the agencies, we conducted interviews with external partners like

public utilities, developers, nonprofits, and a full list of all of those agencies and the external

collaborators are in the appendix. So all that feedback will be incorporated into the report

that we are working on. So here are our next steps. We're currently working on writing and

finalizing the report with Radian, and we plan on having it ready for publication in March of this

year. And when the report is finalized, we will present it to the Budget and Policy Committee.

The report will include preliminary recommendations for the ordinance changes.

And in addition, although this was not the original intent for the work, some of the recommendations that we received could be more appropriate for the Division of Community Empowerment within the Human Rights and Community Partnerships Office.

So we will make sure to share those with the new director as well.

And we plan on continue engaging with the community on this work.

So we will bring back the recommendations for an opportunity for community to provide feedback on those.

This co-governance is really part of our strategy here.

So we're currently working on our community engagement plan, but we hope to, again, go physically through two different parts of the city to gather a lot of different feedback from different voices.

And then after we receive feedback from community on the recommendations, we will use those to craft the ordinance.

We'll offer Councilmember briefings in April and May once we have the first draft of the

ordinance and we plan to bring it through the process and up for a vote this summer.

And while we don't have the recommendations from all the data that we've collected and

the report ready to share yet, we do have some key themes that we wanted to bring to

you all based on what we've heard from community over all of our efforts.

So those key themes are awareness and access, communication infrastructure, equity and inclusion,

governance and accountability, and support capacity and sustainability.

And I think that those really tie into the challenges that Sina presented at the beginning of the presentation.

So we hope that they will also be tied directly to the recommendations in the report once we have that finalized.

So thank you very much.

Thank you so much for your presentation.

I'd love to open it up for questions or conversation.

Can I just make one quick comment?

I meant to say in my introductory comments, really excited, very related to this.

I wanted to recognize our first director of the Division of Community Empowerment,

Stephan Lang, who's with us today.

We went through a couple of rounds of searches to find the right person for this initial

position.

I think we've done good, and we really look forward to working with Ms. Lang along the

way.

Welcome aboard, Stephanie.

Great to see you.

All right.

I think Councilman Rosalski has anything to add?

Alvidrez.

Councilman Alvidrez, and then Watson.

Great.

Thank you guys so much.

I'm really excited about this work in District 7.

There's been a lot of challenges around RNOs.

Looking at the map that you provided, it does concern me that there was outreach to the more high propensity, easiest to access RNOs.

And the RNOs that really struggle are Athmar Park on the west side and that those weren't outreached.

Those are the ones that really struggle to get participation because they're lower income, working class neighborhoods.

So I would encourage as you continue to have conversations with the RNOs that are struggling, not just the ones that are thriving.

I wonder if you have any thoughts or why, you know, you reached out to those and not all.

So let me pull up the map one more time.

These are actually not the RNOs that we've reached out to.

These are the community events that we attended, the red dots.

And then the pink dots are those facilitated neighborhood engagement workshops that everyone was invited to.

And we did, we reached out to all of the RNOs that are currently registered with the city.

So the big database that is available through CPD.

But that is a really great, great point that there are a lot of RNOs that are struggling because they're in different communities that don't necessarily have all the resources that more, you know, wealthier communities have.

So that's definitely something we'll keep in mind.

Yeah, I appreciate that. And like the two events are in like, there's going to be events in wealthier neighborhoods that are easier to go pop up to. What we have found successful in my office, especially in the West Side, is actually knocking doors and like going and talking to individuals. I would encourage that as you start your community outreach plan.

and then there was something else. Oh, another thing that I would love to hear you all

engage with around the community input is talking to the people that have been part of the CBA,

like the people that were part of the soccer CBA, so you could hear directly from them what were the

challenges, benefits, and how we could better that whole process because you were all in those

meetings. They really suffered and missed out on family events and things trying to make this

happen, so I would encourage you to reach out to West East Neighborhood United as you continue your

research. Thank you. Thanks so much. Councilman Watson. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I was going to say

thank you to Councilmember Cashman and Councilmembers Gonzalez-Guterres and your staff.

I mean, this is such an important issue, I'll say, for me personally. I'm reformed, I'll say reformed

former RNO president, twice over in the Whittier neighborhood, and to my residents that may be

watching or maybe viewing this as a recording, those are some of my most, those opportunities

being involved in a registered neighborhood organization as I purchased my first home

in Whittier in 1997 and became president a few months later, those activities formed

really my thinking of what the city is and the opportunity our community has.

And I'll share briefly, the community planning department back then, as it is today, was understaffed, didn't have any money or whatever.

As a registered neighborhood organization, we worked with Denver Foundation to get a grant to do our first neighborhood plan on our own.

And we walked door to door in that very small community Whittier.

And it really taught me of the power of R&Os, but it also taught me of the difficulty,

because we're working full-time, raising money from the Denver Foundation,

knocking on doors, and doing work that we expected the city to do for us.

But we were not as gentrified as we are now,

but we were a predominantly minority community at that point in 1997,

and funds weren't flowing in.

So the work that you all are doing,

looking at how the city can be a better partner,

how they can provide resources for registered neighborhood organizations,

So the disparity that Council Member Alvidera shared isn't felt in communities like the community that I first moved into is so important.

So looking forward to the outcomes and really appreciate the good work that you all have done on this.

Thank you so much.

Other questions or feedback?

Madam President Pro Tem.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

And thank you both for doing this work and doing the outreach.

I appreciate it.

In Southeast Denver, at some of those events that you attended, that conversation with folks, a lot of people didn't, one, know what an RNO was.

And so that education out and often confusing in a lot of neighborhoods, what is an RNO and what's an HOA?

and that duplication of why would I have an RNO because I have an HOA and being able to hear those voices

and incorporating that into the narrative and conversation about what does this look like for our outreach.

I think on the other side, we have so many large neighborhoods in Southeast Denver that don't have an RNO or an HOA

and are not connected in any way.

And so I'm looking forward to having a way that we can pull in more residents to be able to know what those voices are as different development pieces happen.

And the RNO is, the closest RNO is notified.

It's, they're really far away from those areas.

And so I just think this is great work.

Welcome to the position.

And I look forward to the next steps.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Any other comments or questions?

Well, thank you to the two of you and to your incredible team for all the tremendous amount of work you've all put into this.

Thanks so much to the council members who have led this process.

We're really excited about both the progress and what is to come in terms of recommendations that we'll get to see for chances to make this far easier work for folks to engage in and to make an impact with.

So really grateful for your time.

Well done.

Yeah, I need to give it a round of applause.

Okay, that is our only general session we have for today,

and so I will now entertain a motion to move us into an executive session

pursuant to DRMC 234, 6, and 7 for the purpose of receiving legal advice

and discussing the potential settlement of pending litigation against the city.

All those in favor?

Any opposed?

Great. With that, we will enter executive session.

Thank you so much to members of the public for joining.

Have a great Tuesday.

We'll be right back.

Thank you.