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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.

We're gonna do that.

Welcome to Mayor Council.

Thanks so much for being here.

Um we will start with um productions.

What did you do to him?

I know.

But we had to leave a seat.

All right, Amanda Sawyer, district five.

Good morning, Sedana Gonzalez Petienis, one of your council members at large.

Morning, Darren Watson, fine, district nine.

Jamie Torres, West Denver District Three.

Good morning, Mandy Sandoval, Northwest Denver District One.

Great.

Well, welcome.

Thanks so much for being here.

Open up with any announcements that folks may have to share with members of the public at home or fellow council members.

Yes, Councilman Ligas.

Thank you.

Um I will start with uh thanking people that came out to our book club reading the constitution last week.

That was a lot of fun.

We had a great turnout, and I thought the conversations were very thoughtful and respectful.

We will be having our next session of Book Club on the 29th, where we'll be reading articles one, two, and three.

We went over the preamble um last week, so that was a lot of fun.

Um look forward to that later this month.

And I also wanted to remind people that tonight at 6 p.m.

at Athmer Park Rec Center, there's a community meeting on ongoing efforts to unlock housing choices.

You'll have the opportunity to learn about proposed updates, neighborhood housing policy, ask questions and share your input.

It's an important conversation about the future of housing in our community, and we hope to see you there again.

That's tonight at six p.m.

at the Athmer Park Rec Center.

And then also want to uplift the town halls that are happening about the front range passenger rail or COCO, the Colorado Connector.

There are several town halls coming, so check the website.

But this Saturday, April 11th from 10 to 1130 AM at the Center for African American Health at 3350 Hudson Street.

There is a town hall to learn about the project and ask questions and give your input.

So pay attention to those things.

Those are really great conversations.

Thank you.

Thanks so much, Councilman.

Um, other announcements.

Council Watson.

Uh, thank you, Mr.

Mayor.

Um, we've got um a few announcements.

So we have the Colorado Spartans that play at the Denver Coliseum.

This is our second year of hosting the uh Colorado Spartans, which are um the uh arena league team.

I was able to attend several games last year.

If you have not attended, uh please come out to the home opener at 7 p.m.

on April 11th at the Denver Coliseum.

It's in a fantastic fast uh football uh play.

It's like rugby and football put together.

Um, and it is fantastic and tons of funds, and lots of um um uh high schools and stuff show up for this, and so encouraging folks to come and join us at the Coliseum this weekend, April 11th, sorry PM at the Denver Coliseum.

Uh tonight, um Blair Calwell Community Advisory Committee.

We're hosting our second hybrid meeting.

Um, we are so ecstatic that uh for one of the first bond projects that are receiving funding, it will be the Blair Calwell Library.

We have a community advisory group that's been meeting to discuss really the strategic planning for how we should um um invest those funds in community.

So come on out.

You can listen.

It is open to the public and encourage the community advisory uh group members to show up on time, 4 30 to 6 30 p.m.

tonight at Blair Caldwell Library.

And then this week, Councilmember Hines, I'm gonna leave it up to you to share a little bit as well.

We are traveling to New Orleans.

Look out deep south.

Um we're gonna be there this week for the Democratic National Uh Convention uh committee uh meeting in New Orleans.

Um Denver is one of the finalists for the DNC in 2028.

We expect to win.

We're one of the four, and we'll be down there um schmoozing and shaking hands with folks, telling them why we love the mile I CD and why the Mile High City should be selected for the DNC.

That's it.

Mr.

Mayor, thank you so much for being there.

Thank you, Councilman Hines, for doing that as well.

Um other announcements, Councilman Gazalski Terrace.

Thank you, Mr.

Mayor.

Um, so Councilman Cashman, this is a seen which gentleman is here today.

However, he and I um you know the RO work that we have been doing over the past year.

The report has now been released, and so what we are doing now are the community feedback sessions based on the recommendations that have come out in the report.

And so those start this week on Thursday, April 9th.

We will be at Montbello Rec Center from 6 to 8 p.m.

It's open house.

Folks to come in, review the recommendations, provide their feedback, and then on the 11th on Saturday morning, we will be at the Johnson Rec Center in GES uh neighborhood for our North Denver and uh and some of our east side Denver um residents, and that will be from 10 a.m.

to 12 p.m.

So come on by, we'll have you know, on the in the morning we'll have some coffee and treats, and in the afternoon we'll have some snacks.

Thank you.

Thanks so much, Councilman.

Councilman Knights.

Thank you, Mayor.

Uh, as Council Member Watson uh had mentioned, uh, we are going to Nolan's.

I uh I joined the disability community on August 26, 2008, uh, which was the Tuesday night at the DNC here in Denver, and uh in many ways it was the origin story.

I didn't get bit by a radioactive spider.

Um it uh uh that crash um had me grow a lot as a as an individual, and I stopped climbing the corporate ladder trying to make this world a better place for me and started to try to make this world a better place.

And um, and I owe um that crash and the DNC um the uh all the thanks uh for getting me to this place today, um being on City Council, the largest city in Colorado in the economic engine of the Rocky Mountain region.

And um, and it would be lovely.

I would be I would be so honored if we had the 2028 DNC just to as the uh as the origin back to the uh the culmination of having the DNC here again.

So um thank you for for giving me the opportunity to to join you in New Orleans.

Um I think uh I think we have a great shot, and uh I'm really excited to um make that great shot become a reality.

Thank you, Mayor.

Thank you so much for doing it for being a part of that.

Other announcements people want to share.

Okay, well, great.

We have a general session calendar this morning and an executive session uh calendar.

We are delighted people may know um that we are also celebrating public health week right now.

Uh and so we are perfectly on brand to have our team from the Department of Public Health here this morning talking a little about our community health uh improvement plan update and the work they are doing to do a citywide survey of what those needs and uh items are that are rising around the city.

And so love to bring up Karen and Team to join us and give us a briefing on our community health improvement plan.

I'll just sit in public health ish.

Thank you for bringing the dignity of public health to our hearing.

Nathan, thanks so much for being here.

Of course, thank you for having me.

Okay, perfect.

And I've got my slideshow here.

I think I'm ready to go.

Good morning, everyone.

I'm Mary Johnson, members of City Council.

Thank you for having me for the opportunity to talk about some of the work that we do at DDPHE and specifically some of the work we do in collaboration with community partners and Denver residents.

My name is Nathan Keffer.

I'm the community assessment and improvement planning senior analyst for DDPHE.

My primary role with the public health department is to be the project manager for our community health assessment, which we call the CHA, and the Community Health Improvement Plan, which we call the CHIP.

I've had the opportunity to present to Safety Committee before on the CHA.

This is the first time I'll be talking more about our community health improvement plan.

And so thank you again for the time this morning to share our work and for your continued interest and support in what we're doing.

The CHA and the CHIP are part of a community health improvement cycle.

Now, community health assessment and community health planning are essential public health functions.

And I think we do those very well here in Denver in partnership with community organizations and our residents.

We complete a five-year cycle of assessment and improvement planning to learn about and improve the health of Denver residents.

Every step of this health improvement cycle was co-created with community, and I'll elaborate on that a little bit more this morning.

Last year we completed our health assessment, a report on health outcomes and health, the state of health in Denver, and we're currently in the final stages of developing our actionable plan, the CHIP to improve health outcomes around Denver.

So what is the community health assessment?

The purpose of the CHA is to engage our partners and to collect comprehensive data to understand the community's health status, its strengths, and its challenges for health improvement.

We use a mixed methods approach in order to develop our assessment.

This is a mix of public health metrics and numbers, as well as community storytelling.

Taking this mixed methodology approach ensures that we both have a data-driven understanding of health in Denver, as well as one that's grounded in community experience and community leadership.

As I mentioned, the purpose of the CHA isn't just to look at the challenges that we face here in Denver with health.

It's also to highlight the strengths and areas of opportunity and collaboration.

When we talk about health at the public health department, we aren't just simply talking about the state of physical or mental well-being of a person, but we also focus on the social determinants of health.

These are the non-medical factors that we know influence the health of people and communities.

These are factors like access to quality education, access to quality health care, economic stability, neighborhood and built environment such as housing quality, air quality, water quality, and even people's connections to community, to social institutions, to the government, and to one another.

Our child was completed about a year ago in spring of 2025, and that's publicly available on our website.

I'm very proud of the work that our CHA coalition did in order to understand the state of health in Denver.

We had a survey that we launched about a year ago and received more than 2,000 responses around the community.

We held 12 focus groups with population groups and in neighborhoods that are generally underrepresented in this kind of work.

We had two large town halls to share this work and the initiative and how people could be involved.

And we analyzed more than 100 population health metrics, looking at the data and the numbers about health in Denver.

What I really appreciate about our approach to this work is that we had community involvement and community leadership at every step of the way.

We didn't have Denver residents just answering the survey or participating in the focus groups.

They were shoulder to shoulder with all of the public health practitioners, healthcare systems, and academics developing the questions that we asked.

They helped to facilitate our focus groups.

They co-led the town halls with us.

We grounded our community health assessment in lived experience.

We know that people are the experts of their own lives, and we valued that lived experience the same as any other public health practitioner, academic, or healthcare system workers' expertise.

After we collected all of this information, analyzed it with our partners and community members, had additional community feedback, we landed on three CHA priority areas.

These are topics that the data and community members told us that if we were able to affect change over the next couple of years, people's lives and outcomes would be better.

Those areas are access to health care, safe and affordable housing, and systemic racism, specifically as a driver of public health disparities.

And I'll come back to these three priority areas in just a moment.

After we complete the community health assessment, the next stage in our community health improvement cycle is the CHIP, the action plan.

This translates and transforms CHA findings into strategic, shared, actionable goals for community health improvement.

We're basing a lot of the activities that DDPHE is doing and our partner agencies are doing in evidence-based strategies.

So approaches and interventions that have been tested over time and shown to be effective with different segments and populations within our communities.

Denver's CHIP, we're currently in some of the final planning and development stages, and we'll have that available in May 2026.

I'll talk about timeline a little bit more at the end of my presentation this morning.

One thing that's noticeable, sorry, notable about our community health improvement plan is that this is not solely the function or solely the responsibility of a public health department.

A good community health improvement plan is shared across the sectors and across different disciplines that all have a hand in health improvement in a community.

So we facilitate, but we don't own the chip.

Success with our health improvement goals, which are ambitious but doable, relies on cross-sector collaboration, sharing resources, and joint decision making with community partners and Denver residents.

So our role, the role that I fill at DDPEGE is to provide a lot of the coordination and backbone support for this process, but true progress and true health improvement within the scope of our plan is going to require and depend on partner agencies, the support of residents, and the availability of the right resources at the right time.

In order to translate our CHA findings and those three priority areas into actionable goals for health improvement, we began recruiting work groups just about a year ago with one work group focusing on each of our three priority areas.

This helps to ensure collaborative leadership, that public health are not the only voice in the room, we are not the only leaders in the room.

We are working with Denver residents, city and Denver staff across different departments and agencies, healthcare organizations, community-based organizations, grassroots groups, and other government agencies in order to help approach our goals.

The purpose of the work group is to take our three broad health priority areas to develop broad goal statements in collaboration with community, and then over time narrow those down to be actionable objectives that we can take to see and measure health improvement over time.

This is a list of just some of our partners that I wanted to highlight to show the extent of the collaboration that we have as a coalition in order to address our health goals and these health areas.

Across the city and county of Denver, we have support from agencies from CASA to the Department of Human Services to the support from City Council and the mayor's office.

One example, we're very concerned about housing at the public health department.

We have a lot of expertise around safe housing with our residential health inspection program.

We don't necessarily have a lot of institutional experience or expertise around affordable housing.

So you can see that we've brought in host and community planning and development as city partners in order to assure up our subject matter expertise in that area.

I was also recently invited to be able to join one of the Tiger teams for the affordable housing goals, and so that's been a good opportunity to help braid some of Mayor, some of your goals at the high level with some of the work that we've been hearing directly from community support.

We have healthcare partners, including Denver Health, Advent Health Porter, Intermountain Health, the Public Health Institute of Denver Health, and Tepeyac, among others.

And our list of CBO partners is too big to list here, but just highlighting a few in no particular order.

Servicios de la RASA, the Denver Indian Health and Family Services Organization, Thriving Family Colorado, Colorado Access, working with on Medicaid, and many, many more.

I want to take us back to the three priority areas that we identified with our partners and community members in the CHA.

The first one is access to health care.

What I'm going to show next are the broad goal statements, the desired outcomes that we would like to see here in Denver over the next five years through our chip planning.

We have three goals under access to health care.

Those include increasing the accessibility and availability of care, strengthening the affordability and sustainability of Medicaid, and increasing equitable services for communities of color.

Our second priority area is safe and affordable housing.

We have two broad goals here reduce evictions, displacement, and financial hardship for renters, and increase diversity and housing types and expand land use options.

Our third health priority area was systemic racism, specifically as a driver as a root cause of health disparities.

Our goals here include improving access to affordable, high quality child care, improving access to nutritious food, improving access to basic needs to reduce criminalization, and improving financial stability for Denver residents.

A lot of these goals we have seen and we know are in alignment with the strategic plans of other departments and agencies around Denver.

A lot of these goals, which were selected by our partners and community are largely in alignment with the mayor's goals as well.

So we see a lot of opportunity here for synchronization across these health improvement areas.

So how can the chip be used?

There are a number of different ways that our community health improvement plan can be used and referenced and implemented across the city and across our partner agencies.

First, the purpose of a community health improvement plan, particularly at the early stages of planning and development, which is where we are right now, is to provide a shared cross-sector agenda for equitable health improvement.

I don't talk about the community health improvement plan without mentioning collective action.

Having a group of diverse partners across the sectors, across disciplines, all with a stated shared vision for health improvement.

The chip allows us to take collective impact.

I think of it as an umbrella where perhaps otherwise siloed or disparate or disconnected efforts to improve health outcomes in Denver can live and can work together in order to make progress towards our shared goals.

The chip also allows coordinated use of funding, staffing, and resources.

We are all working in a resource constrained environment.

Public health in particular, I feel like we've been hit particularly hard in recent months and years.

We aren't able to make progress on this work by ourselves.

This is why public health shares the community health improvement plan with partners, and why something like a chip is so necessary to see what opportunities we have to collaborate, to align, to share goals, to share resources as possible.

The chip can also be used, as well as our previous CHA data can be used as a way to link budget proposals or ordinance or strategic plans.

How would we do that?

We know that the CHA is deeply aligned and deeply ingrained in community feedback.

We know what we heard in the CHA and what we learned there is what community has told us time and time again in several different ways they need for health improvement.

If an organization or an agency or a department can align budget proposals, ordinances, or strategic plans to that data, there's a guarantee that it's based in the lived experiences of Denverites and what we heard from them.

The community health improvement plan, as I mentioned, it can still be that umbrella organization.

So I like to think of it as someone who is not familiar with Denver at all, or the work that we do here as a community.

I'm not talking about city government, but across Denver.

Someone could look at our community health improvement plan, and at a glance they would be able to see what are some of the priorities that community members have told Denver are important, and what are at least some of the actions or some of the initiatives that collaborators that a coalition of organizations are taking to achieve progress towards health improvement.

As I wrap up here, I wanted to share a little story about the CHAW and Chip in Action and the importance of collaboration in this work.

About three years ago, we started partnering with Avent Health Porters Hospital on South Downing Street here in Denver on some community health improvement work.

They were one of the earliest partners in our leadership steering committee for the CHAW and the CHIP and have been involved in our work group ever since.

Hospital systems have their own requirement for health assessment and health improvement planning as part of the Affordable Care Act.

So I think is a demonstration of the quality of the work that we did and how grounded it is in community feedback.

Advent Health Porter used Denver's CHA Findings to shape its federally required community benefit implementation strategy.

This sort of alignment demonstrates a shared commitment towards the same goals, which we know are important based on community feedback, and it demonstrates how CHA and CHIP findings and the CHA and the CHIP can be used in institutional settings to align these goals and to align these efforts and to share priorities and decision making.

So what comes next?

We have our broad goals under our three health improvement areas.

What we are working on now with our 60 plus partner agencies in Denver residents is finalizing the goals, the strategies, the activities, and the metrics that are going to help us move through the next five years.

We'll publish the infrastructure of our chip in May of 2026.

We'll be sure to let you all know when it's available online.

And we'll take the next 180 days, the next six months to develop an action plan to further operationalize the chip to clarify responsibilities, to define how we're going to measure progress over time, to invite new partners into the work that we're doing.

We're being very methodical and very strategic in this approach to make sure that we're not missing any of the nuance that we need, to make sure that we're not leaving anyone behind who needs to be part of our community health improvement plan.

Notably, we're also embedding some of our CHIP goals into DDPHE's strategic plan.

So having our departmental strategic plan aligned with the community health improvement plan just further demonstrates that shared commitment that we have towards community health improvement based on what we heard from Denver residents.

That's all I had as far as my presentation for this morning.

Again, I wanted to thank you for the time and the opportunity and would love to hear if there are any questions.

Great.

Everybody's in the queue.

So many questions.

I have Councilman Alvidres, then I saw Heinz, Torres, DRC.

Councilman Vidros, would you like to start?

Sure, thank you.

I appreciate the information.

It would be nice to get the slides so we could like go back or stay on something when we're reading it.

So continuing to ask for that.

And one of the things that I wanted to look through to see if I'm right or wrong on slide 11, where you were talking about people being housed, I was concerned about what about people that are homeowners.

So reducing foreclosures that are on the rise, talking about how we keep people from displacement when they are homeowners, I think it's important.

We have a lot of older people or people, even my age who bought houses way before what they're worth today.

And so being able to manage staying in a home that you bought for a lot less than what it's worth today is a continuing challenge.

And one of the things that I see in my district is also unhealthy living conditions.

So people have holes in their roofs that they deal with, they put a bucket under, or they have older heating units and they don't have air conditioning because of climate change, and so curious how we can help people's living conditions and help prevent displacement for homeowners.

Thanks.

Yeah, I do appreciate that feedback.

I think even though the first bullet point does specify renters, I believe, and I will double check and happy to get back to you that I think we're looking at homeowners under that goal as well and potential financial support for them.

We do have a goal under the systemic racism bucket as well, the last one for improving financial stability.

And so I think it's a good consideration to have financial support for homeowners existing at least in one of those two.

So I do appreciate that feedback.

And I think a lot about our seniors who are struggling to figure out where to live and bought homes when they could afford them.

And so I just am concerned that I don't, even with those points, I don't see that coming through in the report.

So thank you.

Great, thank you.

I appreciate that.

Uh Councilman Hides.

Thank you, Mayor.

Um I also am curious about one of the bullet points.

Uh the first one, are they in order or are they just uh in in any order?

Alphabetical, oh, you mean the bullet points under each one?

No, no, no.

I mean so healthcare, uh, housing, and um alphabetical order.

Yeah, that's all.

So um healthcare, uh, you you specifically talk about Medicaid, um, you know, HR1, the big bogus bill, um, you know, significantly defunded Medicaid.

Uh, there's talk about further reduction in Medicaid so that we can have a bigger, stronger army.

Um, and uh, and then the state also is uh has a major budget, you know, uh it's request prices that's uh that's further crunching Medicaid.

So I wonder how much I know you've got the next 180 days to come up with the specific uh, you know, how to operationalize it, but how much influence do we have at the city for bullet point number two under access to healthcare?

We do have some.

Colorado Access is the regional accountability entity for Medicaid.

They're one of the partners that has worked with us over the course of developing these goals.

This is not my particular area of expertise, so let me ask them that exact same question, and I'm happy to follow up with you, but having them as part of our CHIP work group allows us to leverage whatever their influence may be at the state level, which there is some in order to achieve goals.

We're not going to have system wide change on Medicaid.

We don't have that's far outside the scope of our community health improvement plan.

But by making sure that we've got Colorado access at the table, there are opportunities to perhaps support bringing in more providers around Denver who could accept Medicaid, thus expanding opportunities for folks who need that medical service.

There may be the opportunity to see who is eligible for Medicaid in Denver and not enrolled, and do some outreach or enrollment campaigns with some of those vulnerable communities.

So there are a few activities that we could do to help influence that, even though changing Medicaid is a system that's far outside of our scope.

Yeah, I don't know how much we're going to get to enroll new people in Medicaid if there are fewer dollars available.

So Colorado Access is a you know is a great organization.

Um Denver County uh with a competitive bidding um uh Rocky Mountain Human Services has now serviced Denver County instead of Colorado Access in the last two or three years.

Um their competitors uh it might be interesting to include Rocky Mountain Human Services if you haven't talked to them already.

Um and who knows the next competitive bid, maybe Colorado Access will um will give Denver County back just as a as an example, or I mean as a suggestion of another uh organization to reach out to.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Um your point, um, because this is a strategic planning, and I just want to say Nathan is the only person who gets me excited about a strategic talks about this is really great.

You'll have tasks then under each bullets.

So as we work further with community, like what things are we gonna do here collectively to move the needle on strengthening affordability and sustainability?

So those conversations about understate sustainability, maybe it's like we're all gonna galvanize or we're gonna figure out how to help people make those workforce requirements to stay on Medicaid.

Don't know, it's gonna come from community.

And then um, Councilwoman Elvidrez, some things you don't see appear.

The list was how many things were on the list from community?

The number of potential goals to begin with, yes.

Around 190.

So we had to winnow down 190, and I guarantee you other housing affordability, sustainability things were in there to something that we felt was digestible that we could then talk about as a city, as a department.

And so um I think it will feel like some things are missing here because the list was very big when we started off, and we had to like win a winnow winnow down and say, what's we what do we really want to focus in on under those three buckets?

And I am and that's my concern is that what you really want to focus on isn't that, and that concerns me because when you talk about displacement, those are the people most at risk of displacement.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Um next up, Council Tourist.

Oh, thank you.

Um thanks everybody.

I'm your biggest fan on this.

I mean you're gonna be excited about today.

I I love it because you did the work um to talk directly to residents and put it into things that a lot of people can find themselves in.

So uh whether it's our legislators at the federal level, um, state level, and local level.

So I'm looking at this from um what can I do with this information, right?

And I hope that is communicated out because not everybody is going to be able to um heal all of this uh uh challenge.

And um I I went to school for um it was medical anthropology, but public health was absolutely my my goal, my aim and what I was looking at.

Um, and so when I when I look at kind of what we decide all the time, whether it's um uh the policies that we take on or the budget that we allocate, those are things that are the two areas that this is most um informative to, and so one of the things that I think is really important for us is to think about when we're doing something citywide, um, what does the CHIP say about how we should be approaching this?

What is the CHIP say about who is most vulnerable as we as we do this thing?

So even as we do like unlocking housing choices, citywide housing policy aim to um create more diversity in housing.

But with any program or policy that we offer out, if it is a cookie cutter and one size fits all, um we're gonna exacerbate things that have already been um concerns about um equity and access to begin with.

And so um what I hope when we do these things, we're also looking at it and we ask ourselves how does this affect I saw in your um uh your your online kind of um uh guidance piece on this.

How is this affect redlined, like historically redlined neighborhoods?

Um, and what I what I really want our our citywide policy to look at is is kind of micro nuance and um what's happening in particular neighborhoods uh that we might be overlooking as we launch this citywide thing that could spur displacement that could spur access issues.

So that's where I think it is a constant look back at this and not just good luck, DDPHE things for tracking right all of the things that are happening on this.

It's I think up to us to make sure that we're embedding this as a decision making like feedback and sounding board to the decisions that we make.

So a couple things that jumped out to me.

One is is that when we do citywide housing policy, um uh discrimination.

Um we've scaled back our discrimination office in the city, and I think it should be ramped up in future years.

Um BIPOC exclusion.

When we do any effort, are we doing it going um okay?

We know American Indians are disproportionately affected in our homeless community.

Um what is how does what we're doing affect them in a way that we need to tailor something or um uh create a different path or get their input right?

Um so it is that systemic racism category, which I'm actually really appreciative that it's in your top three, but it's also really hard to understand and tackle, and so it is in everything, and um so it I think it is then kind of those questions that we've kind of constantly be pivoting back to and going, how does this affect these populations, whether they're LGBTQ, black, um, Latino or uh American Indian or any other, right?

And we don't really often do that kind of niche inquiry.

So I really appreciate this, and I hope that it really does we we start to see it get embedded in what other departments are doing, frankly, um, because it all feeds back, and if you're tracking something and we're not actually doing anything with it in mind, um, then it's just a tracking tool, right?

Um, and so I just thank you for putting all in the work to get this, and I look forward to figuring out how we can help support implementing them.

Thank you.

Thanks.

One thing I would just add to this point, so I was thinking about this as well, Council Touris.

Um while this was not complete when we started our goal setting for the year, bless you.

Whenever we do that, we always look directly at the lens on equity for the feedback we've seen across the city.

So I think right now you will see in multiple of our citywide goals the same uh recommendations and observations you find in this report spread across the goal template.

So even if you look at things like our climate goal around green infrastructure, which is focused on how do you address the parts of the city where we see heat islands growing more and more predominantly, and how do we bring more green infrastructure to those places to help manage heat?

That's an explicit goal.

Obviously, our focus and child friendly around access to affordable, reliable child care, which we know there are children spread disproportionately around the lower income parts of the city, where we want to make sure those services are available when we look at uh same with our focus on youth work opportunities for young people.

We're looking at disproportionately underserved parts of the cities where kids are not getting access to work opportunities and how we help incentivize that that to take place.

Obviously, on the safety work, our place network investigation sites with our economic development work around microinvestments in those places.

So this will be a really great uh additional guide to the work that we do for the five years to come.

But I think we have tried to take into uh consideration both the work you've done historically, the previous trips and CHAs on this, and also the feedback we get from our Office of Social Innovation about where we know there are equity gaps and how those should drive all of our citywide goals.

And so this will be a really good tool for us to continue to inform that going forward.

Great, thank you.

Um Madam President Protect.

Uh thank you, and thank you for the presentation.

Um I think the focus on the social determinants of health is so incredibly important, and there are some components of it that in the presentation, I just wanted to ask for some clarification.

Um I think about I I think it was what 12 or 2100 um respondents.

So across the city, um, what I see in my district is a growing population of people who are just incredibly isolated from resources in a community that we don't have a lot of nonprofit organizations, that we are in the pipeline to get our first health clinic with Denver Health.

And so I think oftentimes in that broader, you know, narrative of what's happening in the city, we miss some growing populations that are so incredibly disconnected from access.

And so I would just hope that in the planning and thinking about where people have access to child care or some of the healthcare services, it would we could talk a little bit more about like what is that voice that's coming from you know a Southeast Denver perspective.

Yeah, and excuse me, I remember you you shared that concern in safety committee as well, and we've been often when you look at maps of disparity, whatever the category might be across Denver, we do see there's a lot of focus on the inverted L.

And what we have seen a little bit is in some of the neighborhoods in your district is exactly what you were just saying, right?

So it's even starting to reflect in some of the metrics that um are collected about Denver.

For the citywide survey, um, we did.

I won't go too far into our methodology, but we did have a way to try to over-sample areas of the city where there was higher social vulnerability using the CDC social vulnerability index.

Um particularly areas where there were higher population density because that might increase the likelihood that people would respond to our survey.

We nailed 100,000 postcards to households in Denver, and so I couldn't speak to any particular district right now, but it assuming that there are census tracks in your district that meet those criteria, which I'm sure that there are, as far as high social vulnerability and medium to high population density, then we likely oversampled those areas in the hope of getting feedback from those communities.

So that's one small little piece of information that we have.

But I appreciate your thought, appreciate your feedback, and it is something that we're continuing to look at is some of the neighborhoods that are outside of the outside of the inverted L, outside of those areas where we do have higher concentrations of community-based organizations, nonprofits, etc.

So thanks.

I appreciate that.

The the um we're having a similar conversation with Dito.

Um some of our census tracts are literally probably you know, more higher income, lower income, you put it all together, it just becomes flat, and so nothing, you know, we we miss the nuance, and I think did you say micro nuance or yeah.

It's like being able to think um or to look at what that nuance is, um, because I think what is happening is is that we're missing um when you just look at maybe a sense of track, we're missing um some of those uh some of those higher need communities that we have in Southeast Denver.

Um I know 190 plus uh different you know uh goals that you were trying to reach.

I think the child care um nuance is so incredibly um important, um, and I even I think that it probably needs to be broken down even further into infant care, infant and toddler care, and then you have your uh under the age of you know four, but the out-of-school time care.

So we have school-age children and middle school and teens that are just have no not a lot of access to activities, engagement places to be and that is such a uh not only good for the child, but also a form of care that is being provided to to those families in a safe place for their kids to be.

So I would just encourage kind of going a little bit deeper into what child care looks like and what's needed at that time.

I know you know a lot of the schools and dollars are being cut as well for those out-of-school time programs, but I think the majority of us don't get off at three in the afternoon or two, um, and so much needed programs and much needed support in that area.

Um, but I my last one, my last thought is um also access for our seniors, and I think um councilwoman Alvidras brought this up earlier, but really being able to think about um the tremendous isolation and access to care, access to so many services for our older adults is really becoming a crisis, and I know I see it in my um district a lot, um, and it's just compounding, I think year after year.

Thank you.

Uh Councilman Watson, and this reminder, we do have one exact session item, so I think if you if there's no one else who might be here.

Very quick.

Thank you so much, uh, Mayor.

And I just want to start with Clauding Nathan.

I gotta say, the mayor's sure that you have enthusiasm.

I actually was um director of all enthusiasm on this work.

Um but I think what impressed me the most is really the thoughtfulness, the community form steps that not you, but the entire team took, and really the impact, the work that you're going to do with the chip to make sure it's informed across the board, not just simply for the good work that DDPHE does and the communities that you serve.

And so I'm overly impressed.

I'll dive deeper when we have more time, but I do want to elevate um a really gr an important process that we've been collaborating with along with Councilwoman Torres and Councilmember Flynn on the food uh summit uh that this council approved of for us uh the funding for us to have.

This is going to be uh I think instrumental in some of the work and the gatherings and the outcomes and targets that we will have within that food summit and all of the work that we're doing in response to uh communities and um um and making sure that they they have access to food throughout, no matter what happens, federal, state, and local.

So thank you so much.

This so in uh enthusiastically presented, so inspired me that we can look across the city and leverage this for so many things that we're doing.

So I appreciate a good work on this.

Thank you, Mr.

Mayor.

Thank you so much, Councilman.

Any other questions?

Thank you all for making it a fantastic week to celebrate public health week.

We are very proud to have you leading the city and thanks for all your amazing work to help us support every resident who needs it.

We really appreciate you being here.

Thank you so much.

Have a great day.

Uh all right, we do have um one executive session item, so I will now entertain a motion to move us into an executive session pursuant to DRMC 234A, sections three, six, and seven for the purpose of discussing the settlement, the pending litigation and legal advice related there too.

So moved.

Second.

All in favor?

Aye.

Aye.

Any opposed?

Great.

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

We will now enter executive session, they don't have a back.