We have three items tonight.

Um, and so I think we're just gonna roll right into this.

The first one is ballot items.

And overview, Gabby, is that right?

Sure.

That works for me.

Hello, everybody.

Uh good evening.

I'm Gabby Ray, Director of Communications and Community Engagement.

And tonight with Luke, uh parts and recreation.

Um I can hear myself.

It'll be turned off.

Um anyway, so we're here tonight to talk to you about ballot item um surveying that we did.

As you remember in the fall, you gave direction that we should do some ballot surveys, um, statistically valid surveys about the ECC and a possible expansion.

Is it that computer?

Yeah, okay.

Um, the presentation's the one with the presentation.

So we'll pause.

I gave you that advice, I'm sorry.

Sorry.

Yeah, no, this is why IT should never do legal work and legal teams.

Very fair, very fair.

Um, while we're getting all that set back up, I think, yeah, the computer just seems to be giving me some feedback, Adam.

I don't know from when, but that's what we're dealing with in here.

Um we'll have a presentation this evening from Polco.

Uh Polco has been doing some of our community surveys for the last decade or so.

Um, and so we do have contracts with them for both surveying um and for for balancing act, which is also a budgeting tool and engagement tool that we can use for the public helping us with our budgets.

Um, so we use them for a survey about uh the ECC, the possible expansion and renovation at the ECC.

We asked our community what they thought about paying for that possibility of possible expansion and renovation.

Um, as you had already had a presentation from Luke and the facilities team about what that might look like.

Now we asked uh the community if they would be willing to pay for it and in what form.

So I'm gonna pass it over to Jason, who is with Polco, and he's gonna walk through a presentation with you, um, all about the results that we got from that survey, and then we'll have some time for discussion, and then we'll talk to you about the other ballot item that you uh have discussed for this year.

So Jason, I'll pass to you.

Perfect.

Sounds great.

Uh good evening, everyone.

I just want to confirm just to make sure you can see my screen on your end.

Yes, we can.

All right, perfect.

Well, my name is Jason Newmeyer.

I am the director of survey research here at Polco and National Research Center.

I am very pleased to be here tonight to present the results from the 2026 Erie Community Center uh expansion survey.

Before I begin, on behalf of myself and my Polco co-workers, I would like to extend a thank you to Gabby, who was our primary contact throughout the survey development and implementation process.

Uh she was a pleasure to work with, provided thoughtful feedback on the survey, on the report that's been shared, and on the deck that we're going to work here through here this evening.

So before we dive into the results, I would just like to share a brief background on Polco.

So Polco's main mission is to unite people, data, and government leaders to help communities to thrive through informed decision making that ultimately improves resonance overall quality of life.

And as Gabby uh hinted at before, we provide surveys, simulation tools and advanced analytics that help to build stronger, more connected communities.

Polco merged with the National Research Center back in 2019 and combined their decades of social science expertise with Polco's uh technology.

And today, Polco and NRC are probably best known for some of our national benchmarking surveys, like those you see on the right hand side, the National Community Survey, the Community Assessment Survey for Older Adults, among a few others.

But we also work with dozens of communities around the U.S.

on customs surveys about specific topics or initiatives, like we did here in Erie.

In 2022, Polco and Balancing Act combined forces, and we now allow residents to share their insights through budgeting processes like interactive simulations and transparent prioritization projects.

So ultimately, taken together, Polco provides the tools necessary to help empower resident voices.

So let's first take a look here together at an overview of how this survey was actually conducted before we turn to some of those key takeaways.

So to select survey recipients, a list of addresses was purchased from the United States Postal Service and it was cleaned using town boundaries to remove any addresses that lie outside of Erie's borders.

From that list, 4,500 households were randomly selected to receive these survey invitations.

Those households received survey mailings, as you can see, starting on March 3rd, and this survey remained open for four weeks.

The first mailing was a postcard invitation.

That mailing was then followed a week later by a paper survey packet that included a return envelope.

Both of those invitations included a web link and a QR code, allowing the resident to respond to the survey online should they so choose.

The survey was also available in both English and Spanish, and all mailings included instructions in both of those languages.

In total, 846 completed surveys were returned, resulting in a 19% response rate and a margin of error of plus or minus 3%.

The results were then weighted using the most recent census data and the American community survey results to ensure that these results shown here tonight better reflect Erie's overall adult population.

Now you may have also heard that in addition to that random sample, the town also shared an online version of the survey that was available to all residents.

That survey was open for the final two weeks of data collection, and an additional 803 responses were received there.

The presentation that we'll work through here tonight and the main report that's been shared with you are based on the 846 responses from the randomly selected households, but results to that open participation survey are also included in the full report of results.

So with that, let's take a look at some key takeaways.

First and foremost, residents are broadly satisfied with the town's parks and recreation system.

So survey respondents were asked to rate the quality of five facilities and services that are provided by the Parks and Recreation Department of Erie.

Ratings, as you can see, were consistently strong across all of these service areas.

Parks received the highest positive evaluation with 85% of respondents giving excellent or good marks, followed by trails at 78%, the Erie Community Center at 77%, and recreation programs at 75%.

The availability of information about parks and recreation offerings was also viewed favorably, with about three-quarters of respondents rating that positively.

Overall, taken together, these results indicate broad satisfaction with the town's parks and recreation system and obviously reflect particularly high approval of our park facilities.

Now looking more specifically at renovating and expanding the Erie Community Center, we find that most residents support those efforts.

So respondents were asked whether they supported or opposed renovating and expanding the Erie Community Center to address current space and program constraints.

As you can see here, about three-quarters of respondents indicated that they either strongly or somewhat supported the expansion, while about one in 10 did not have an opinion either way.

Only a small majority, 14%, reported either strongly or somewhat opposing this potential project.

Now, of those respondents who supported the Erie Community Center expansion, the most frequently cited reasons relate to population growth and the need for enhanced services.

Just over one quarter of respondents indicated that Erie's growing population causes a need for expanded facilities, while another quarter referenced the desire for new or improved services as their primary motivation.

A smaller but still notable share of 21% reported that the current Erie community center is overcrowded or too small.

Additional reasons included the belief that the project would add some value to the community.

And as you can see here, about 5% of respondents said that they were either a current user or plan to be a user in the future.

Now, among those respondents who opposed the Erie Community Center expansion, concerns about financial impacts were the most frequently cited.

One quarter of respondents opposing the project identified the overall cost as their primary concern, while 22% expressed worry that the expansion would lead to higher taxes.

Other reasons for the opposition were common but less uh less notable.

You can see here about one in 10 respondents said that they just don't use the Erie Community Center, while another one in 10 felt that the expansion was unnecessary at this time.

A similar proportion believed that the town had other, more pressing priorities, and around one in 20 indicated that Erie is already overspending in some areas.

And then finally, uh about 2% referenced concerns relating to planning or management issues around this project.

Finally, in that portion of the survey, respondents were also asked how important it was to them and their household that the Erie Community Center expansion focus on six of these different areas.

So about two-thirds of respondents rated expanded fitness space as an essential or very important area of focus for this expansion.

Roughly half considered increased indoor playground and youth spaces, additional gymnasium space, and the modernization of mechanical, electrical, and AV systems to be essential or very important.

As you can see, around one third of respondents gave a central or very important ratings to improving staff and administrative space, while around one in five rated the addition of new multipurpose meeting rooms as an important expansion priority.

And the third and final part of the survey really focused on how we how this expansion would be paid for.

And as we can see here, most residents would prefer a sales tax increase over a property tax increase to fund this expansion.

So after reviewing first the current status of Erie's parks and recreation system and providing their overall opinion on the expansion, residents were asked about a few different potential funding mechanisms.

Specifically how likely they would be to vote yes if there were a ballot measure proposed for a sales tax or a property tax increase to fund the Erie Community Center expansion.

Now around seven in 10 respondents said that they would be very or somewhat likely to vote in favor of a sales tax increase of 0.5% to fund the Erie Community Center expansion.

You can see at the bottom, about five and ten would be very or somewhat likely to vote in favor of a property tax increase of 1.653 mils to fund the Erie Community Center expansion.

Now, in addition, we also added some additional information here to give respondents an ability to understand what those actual impacts of those increases would look like on the day-to-day lives.

A three cent increase in sales tax, for example, on a standard $6 coffee, or a $90 annual property tax increase on a home valued at $800,000.

Now, support for the two funding mechanisms did differ in the composition of the two supporter bases that you see on the bottom.

For the sales tax increase, a majority of supporters fell into that very likely category, 43%, with an additional 26% saying that they were somewhat likely to vote yes.

In contrast, support for property tax increases was more evenly split between the two levels of likelihood, 24% saying they were very likely to support, while 22% said that they were just somewhat likely.

So these patterns indicate that not only did the sales tax option have a larger overall base of support, but it also had a higher proportion of respondents who expressed a strong likelihood of voting in favor.

Now, in a subsequent question, respondents were asked which funding option they would prefer if they were forced to choose.

If the town did decide to move forward with the Erie Community Center expansion, as you can see, around half of respondents opted for the sales tax increase, while close to two in 10 opted for the property tax increase.

Also, two in 10 said that this is just not the time to expand the Erie community center that matches some of the numbers we saw earlier in the deck, while about one in 10 were undecided on how to proceed.

Similarly, we asked respondents who preferred these two different options.

What was their most common or what was the reason why they supported the sales tax or the property tax increase?

Among those who preferred the sales tax increase, the most common reason was the concern about current existing property tax levels.

So about four in 10 respondents indicated that property taxes were already high, making the sales tax option more acceptable to them.

Another 24% preferred a sales tax because it distributes the cost among a wider base of residents, visitors, and consumers.

Other motivations were cited less frequently, 11% referenced home affordability as a key factor.

9% said a sales tax was easier to absorb or digest than a property tax increase.

And then smaller shares noted that they can control how much they spend in Erie, or that a sales tax is simply just more favorable to them personally.

And then finally, among respondents who preferred the property tax increase, the most common reason was concern about the fairness of the sales tax.

About one third of respondents preferring the property tax describes sales tax as either unfair or regressive, making the property tax approach more acceptable to them.

Around 15% felt that residents rather than visitors or non-resident consumers should be responsible for funding this project.

And about one in 10 cited the stability and predictability of property tax revenue as their primary motivation.

Finally, some smaller shares here toward the bottom of the slide reference personal economic circumstances or local economic conditions, including not being a homeowner or the perception that Erie does not have uh enough businesses to support a sales tax based approach.

So, in sum, our three key takeaways here from our survey.

First and foremost, residents are broadly satisfying with the town's current parks and recreation system.

Most residents support renovating and expanding the Erie Community Center.

And when asked to choose, most residents would prefer a sales tax increase over a property tax increase to fund the ECC expansion.

So with that, uh I will catch my breath.

Uh, and I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have about the survey, its implementation, the report, or this deck that we just ran through here tonight.

Thank you so much.

All right, great.

I will bring it back first to Gabby and Luke to see if you have any other comments before we jump in and ask questions.

Just super happy that the survey showed that they're satisfied with parks and recreation.

So regardless of the discussion here tonight, that's a that's a that's good for me.

So and that's a direct reflection of the staff uh that we have and the hard work that they put in every day.

So I'd be reminisced if I didn't mention um that the community is satisfied with parts and recreation because of the staff that we have.

So awesome.

And I would just note too.

So after this discussion this evening, um, our plan is to continue with education and outreach about this possible ballot item.

Um assuming because the results were so good that that still feels appropriate.

Um, and so Rachel and some other team members from the ECC are planning to be at the town fair to actually have some renderings out there and talk through and answer questions there.

And of course, we have a web page and other materials out about this as well, of which we will be um promoting and pushing information until we no longer can, assuming you add something to the ballot, and then we have to kind of stop doing that.

So uh just wanted to let you know that this is just one piece of a longer process as we get going, and um uh let me know if you have any questions about that.

But first, let's get through the survey questions that you may have.

All right, sounds good.

Just bring it back to the group here, and this is study session format.

So anybody can just jump in and we stop the conversation if we're talking over each other.

Well, well, we didn't we didn't segment in any way in any demographic way or ask specifically businesses, right?

What they thought.

No, this was just a survey for residents at this point, yeah.

So, how many um let's say it's a sales tax?

Um about how many years uh would it take to um pay off the expansion plan?

Was that 20 year?

Uh we you can either do a 30-year uh sales tax revenue bond or a 15-year-old, just kind of depending on the rates and uh what that kind of looks like.

And we've already engaged with our bond council on that and director Hancock, and so we have some of those initial numbers.

So you're either looking at a 15-year or a 30-year okay.

Um based on the you know, this is kind of more of a question about strategy if if we do go forward with this.

Um it'd be 15 to 30 years to pay off, probably would delay a second rec center.

Should we are we looking at going bigger on the expansion uh with the anticipation that it may be um several years before we get a second?

Yeah, that would be a council directed if they wanted to pursue a second community campus for sure.

At the um, I think it's said in here a 0.5% sales tax increase.

Is does that generate enough money to do a 15-year bond?

Well, I think that's the that's the next step that we need to take.

So when we talked to our bond council back in you know, January, February, um, we did calculate at a you know 30 to 32 million dollar general obligation bond.

That would have that would be sufficient to generate what we needed to make a payment on it.

So, but you know, things things change, and so we'd have to revisit that um when it comes time to put that on the ballot to to figure out what that final number is.

Yeah.

Okay.

And I was saying I will say um Sarah Hancock was trying to be here with us today, but they're they lost power up in Longmont.

Um, and she's not feeling well, so she did she didn't want to be in person.

But she had mentioned that you know, watching our sales tax numbers and and she'll come present to that to you as well.

It has been lower this year than it was previously.

So when we had bond council do all the math for that um 0.5% sales tax, it was accurate at the time, and now we're gonna have to revisit that.

So it's entirely possible that that would need to be higher in order to get the amount that we need in the time that we need it.

Um, but that is something we haven't done the math on yet.

Um, wanting to get through this presentation and get some solid numbers from finance about our sales tax revenue outlook.

Um, so probably not going to stick to that exact same number, but um, director Hancock didn't think it would go up that much, not significantly, uh just probably minimal increase.

So there's a strategy we're gonna have to eventually work through on whether you do correct me if you think anything I'm saying here is wrong.

This is where at least where it's coming together in my brain at this point, we would do uh a 0.5 sales tax increase.

It would be to pay for the expansion and remodel of the rec center.

Could we say that this is a tax into perpetuity only to be used for recreational facilities?

So that when we paid off the expansion and the remodeling, then we've got a revenue stream to start paying for the second rec center.

Does that make sense?

Yes, if if council wanted to do that, yes.

We've seen a lot of other communities have a general obligation bond for construction, and then uh that sunsets when you pay off that bond, and then the whatever remaining amount remains as a as an operations fund or a capital improvement fund for parks and recreational facilities.

So, yes, you if council wanted to go that direction, you absolutely could.

It's just how you write the bank ballot language.

Yeah, so I think that planning, one of the questions uh I think was on there about um you know, planning for this is a very small percentage.

I forgot what it was two percent um on there.

People didn't want to do this because we didn't plan for it.

I get that, but if we can plan for it now so that there's a revenue stream later for the second one, then I may be in favor of that, depending on what the other options are.

Um so does that affect if something comes up and we need to have a tax increase of for some other project that we're not imagining right now.

Yeah, so I think this is why it'd be good to know what other communities do in this because it would be saying, hey, we're gonna have a 0.5 sales tax, and it is going to be used into perpetuity to build recreational facilities and to potentially operate them if there's leftover revenue.

But if you do that, then that 0.5 can't be used for other things that may come up.

You end up laying one tax on top of the next, and most communities do that.

It's just a question of what the appetite is for how far you go with that.

Like how long.

Or possibly use the strategy that's St.

Frain has recently effectively used, which they bonded, right?

Property tax.

I mean, I think we can use the same concept on sales tax, but property tax, they were paying off their bonds, and they went back to the voters and said without raising your taxes, basically keeping that revenue stream intact.

Would you approve to continue with those payments so that we could build the next set of schools?

And so maybe that's a strategy where we we lock this into just our rec center, and then when that time comes for the second rec center, we can go back to the voters and say without increasing your taxes, we extend it out further.

Yeah, go ahead.

So uh in the last survey, we send it out to the debt community, right?

And now 800 people will decide for 40,000 people.

Yeah, so the the survey that the council had last summer was sent out to all residents in the town.

Um we ended up getting basically the same percentage of respondents.

Um so from a statistically valid perspective, this one that went out to 4500 residents with the weighting is the same as saying we send it out to all the residents and still got the same percentage back.

Thank you.

Um a couple questions here from the uh just looking at some of the internals here.

So um it looks like for uh the respondents versus uh single family condominium duplex apartment.

Um do those numbers uh did we looked at to compare.

Does that pretty well reflect?

I mean, I know most people are in single family homes in areas, but do those numbers kind of it was mostly thinking about the apartments um because that seemed a little low to yeah, it was pretty close to our our demographics from the census.

Um it wasn't far enough off, it was certainly not outside of like that three percent margin of error either.

Um that away from what our census tells us we have in town.

Now, obviously, the census is a little bit behind, right?

Our growth um, but it was close enough that we weren't concerned about the numbers being too far off of what we would have expected on any of the demographics that were in the survey.

Okay, yeah.

And I don't know, Jason, if you had any other thoughts on that.

Yeah, I'll just add one quick thing there.

We obviously wait to the most recent census.

The American community survey uh is also run by the census every year, so there is a little bit more updated data since 2020.

Uh also all of those demographic questions that we asked, you can actually find in the full report breakdowns by gender, length of residency, uh, tenure, all of those types of things.

So you could see there's even districts, right?

Three major districts.

So if you'd like to see how those different areas or different demographics responded, that's all available to you in the full report too.

Oh, excellent.

Excellent.

I'll look for that.

Um, and then my other question would be on page 14.

Um so it looks like expanded fitness space was the uh main requested need, and then um I see the third on there, just below 50% was the additional gymnasium.

So I'm taking back to our previous uh discussion, and we kind of had two different uh layouts.

One was you know, expansion on the on the existing building, and then the other was you know, adding a second gymnasium space.

So I guess based on this, and then based on depending on what kind of income we can we we can generate uh to to pay the bonds for this.

I mean, are are we are we fairly comfortable doing a two-phased approach for this?

Because it seems like you know, those were pretty high options that people want both, or at a minimum, people seem to really want those.

Yeah, so what we all presented to you back in January January was was was the whole project.

Okay.

So yes, we are considering that second gymnasium, additional fitness areas, rework in the A side, which is that South Side with additional community spaces, mini miners playground, adjusted staff and administrative areas.

So this is the full package.

Cool.

So what we what we're asking about is is the full package.

Okay, cool.

Yeah, I'm pleased to see the public seems to be thinking along the same lines we are.

So yeah, those things are reflect there.

So yeah, I guess I was gonna ask are there any surprises when it you know when they they mentioned which areas were most important.

Were there any surprises or was it in line with what you know?

We we did uh a survey back in November 2024.

We went through all of last year and presented the connecting you to fund playbook, and there are no surprises here.

We know we need additional aquatic space, right?

Which is not part of this project, but we know it.

We know we need more fitness space, we know we need more gym space, and we know we're busting out the seams and sort of staff and administrative space and community room space.

So all the things that we have we have planned for and asked the community about came out in this particular survey for sure.

Okay, so I'm not sensing anybody that wants to stop our momentum here, just kind of looking around.

So, with that, would the next step then be that you come back to us with one, two, three options to say we could do it this way, this way, or this way?

Yes, we would make an actual motion and uh approve whatever you bring to us.

And that's gonna be around July.

End of July, early August is the deadline to decide the ballot language.

Okay, so this will move pretty quickly then from here.

But between now and then we'll just be a lot of community uh education on what we're doing and what what the potential asks could be.

All right, awesome.

Councilmember Mordelo, I did want to correct one thing because I did exactly what I didn't want to do, and I answered too quickly on the on the uh on the series, uh the revenue bonds, it's a 20-year term or a 30-year term.

You just listen to me.

I said twice, I don't know.

One last question.

So this basically maximizes the footprint of that property.

Yes.

Yes.

All right, yeah, there's there's really to the limits.

All right.

Um well, great.

I'm gonna let Jason go.

Thank you so much.

Really appreciate you being here.

That was fantastic.

Um and then we have another topic.

All right, sounds good.

Thanks, Jason.

Who might proceed the survey here?

I don't repeat.

Did you get it?

Good.

I did not.

Um, so for the like little last part of our ballot discussion, we wanted to talk to you about the rest of your direction that you gave in the fall.

Um, so if you remember, you directed that we should do the statistically valid survey about the ECC expansion and get those numbers, and then also that we could do a non-statistically valid, just a survey of the community about a potential lodging tax.

Um, when we talked to you about that in the fall, the idea that staff presented was that the lodging tax was going to specifically be to fund um to take taxes from a hotel that is planned for town center that does not yet exist, but we wanted to have the tax in place.

After further research um from staff and trying to get things in place to start that conversation, we realized that a lodging tax in the state of Colorado has to cover any lodging that is 30 days or less.

So that means it does have to cover a short-term rentals if we're going to implement a short-term uh lodging tax in uh the town.

So I wanted to make sure that everybody was aware of that requirement.

Um, so that would be a different question.

I mean, the question is still, would you support a lodging tax?

But now it's not just a lodging tax on a hypothetical theoretical hotel in the future, but now it is would you support a lodging tax on a possible hotel and on short-term rentals?

Um, when we had this conversation a few years ago now, um, we weren't quite prepared to ask this question because we didn't have a full grasp on what short-term rentals look like in the town.

Um, and we weren't entirely sure kind of how how that might work for us in collecting it and what it would be used for and all those sorts of things.

Um, and we have Director Normella here tonight as well from her um department's perspective on this.

If you had some questions, but it is on her work plan this year uh to work on updating some of our municipal code for short-term rentals and kind of what it looks like to have licensing and some of that in the town, which does not currently exist.

I will say a lot of this conversation has been sparked because Sundance is on the way.

Um, and many communities surrounding us um are already seeing a lot of their short-term rentals booked out um for that event next February.

So it is timely, it is something worth talking about, it is something worth deciding if we want to um collect money on that that event and that opportunity.

So I just want to lay all that out there for some discussion.

So I probably need more information myself, but my gut feeling says don't rush this because then if we incite the those that are doing short-term rentals without really understanding what we're doing, that could be a problem.

On the flip side, I philosophically don't have a problem with with doing that.

That's literally just off the top of my mind here.

And I'll say one more thing.

I'll just note, and then yes, please give some data and information.

Um, I did draft uh a possible survey already that I've kind of sent around to some of the key players internally saying, like, what else are we missing?

What do we need to know?

Is this an acceptable set of questions to ask our community?

And could we be ready internally?

Um, I think we're feeling fairly good about all of that, um, but wanted to bring this to you first.

And and Sarah was pretty key in in pulling a lot of the details together for that potential draft survey as well.

So I'll just say I did some additional research on just who in the area has lodging taxes, and honestly, um, most of our neighbors do.

Um, you know, I'll throw out you know, obviously Boulder, but Broomfield, Firestone, Frederick, um, Longmont, Lafayette, Louisville, Superior, Thornton, you know.

So we're kind of um, you know, we would be in good company to have a lodging tax, and all of these lodging tax, as Gabby said, they do apply to anything 30 days or less, and or under 30 days, I should say.

And so all of those same communities, if they do have a licensed short-term rental program, then they are collecting tax on those.

So every one of them has um, you know, it are ubiquitously collecting if if those short-term rentals are in um uh you know, require a license.

Those that I'm still researching how many are actually doing a license or some type of registration for short-term rentals.

So uh I would I can come back with you or come back with uh greater depth of uh research on that, but just you know, Firestone, superior, broomfield, Arbata, Arvada just put one into place that was activated May 1st.

Um so you know, I think a lot of people are starting to get into registering in some way, shape, or form their short-term rentals, and this is best practice as we move forward, particularly as they increase in this area.

You know, if we have events like the Sundance Festival.

So we anticipate, and you'll hear work plan item later this evening is that with the short-term rental, some top some type of license or registration is on our is on the books for doing this year.

We would go out to the community and invite those who do have them to come talk to us and just let us know kind of how that works.

And in looking at some of the structures of these license programs, they are meant to help with code enforcement, particularly if you get a short-term rental in your neighborhood.

We have them already.

Um, and if there are problems with how they're being run, we can't really, since we don't regulate them right now, we don't really we can't go and enforce what's happening there.

So a lot of these programs and the and the ordinances that go with them do have a structure for you know, having to have certain elements not only in the rental itself, but some of them limit how many people can go into each, you know, for each bedroom.

Um, and they just have some basic life safety and building requirements.

So it's a good I I think it's a good thing to have in terms of a lodging tax.

I don't think we would be out of line at all with any of our neighbors and establishing one.

What's the range of rates now?

Yeah, a lot of them, so it it varies, but in general, they're somewhere around four to seven percent.

Um some of the city, some of the communities, they'll have um like a four percent lodging tax, but they'll also have the the um the unit or the person would also have to pay sales tax, and then those with higher percentages, like around seven percent, they sometimes uh exclude sales tax having to be paid.

So everyone's kind of collecting anywhere from three to ten percent as the that's the range.

How do you envision um this whole licensing program worked?

Would we need more staff?

Who collects the tax?

This is uh did we collect it locally?

Do we how does it work?

Yeah, so I had a conversation with direct owner um Hancock, and she was assuming that we would be collecting it um ourselves as a home role community, and we would like to know how many we're talking about.

Right, because as she's you know, at a certain amount, if there's five of them, cool, we could be an Excel spreadsheet and we track it that way, but you know, you get more than that, and she's gonna need probably a software in order to take in all of that information, which has a budgetary um implication to it.

And if there are hundreds of them, like that that could be a staff member, and so it really does kind of depend how many we think we're um going to have in the town.

So we could certainly look at places like Airbnb, VRBO, some of the other rentals to get a sense for that, um, but you don't really know for sure until the licensing is kind of in place.

I don't also know how many people are complying with the license.

True.

So some of that comes from complaint based.

My neighbors written out their place and they haven't got a license kind of thing, and some of it just comes from water if I guess so.

What would enforcement look like?

Well, we have to look more into the overall structure.

I mean, we've just started doing the um some preliminary research, so we'd have to look and see how we want to do it and what do we staffed to be able to do.

And we actually get inquiries now from people who say, I would like to do this.

Do you have any requirements?

No, we don't.

Um, so I think there are people who want to follow the rules, and uh, I think it's it within this area, there are rules, and people are kind of wondering, you know, when we're yeah, what are ours?

So I think they'll be receptive to us establishing some regulation around it.

And yeah, but there will be people that will have to go and see, and that would be something that it we would treat as a regular code enforcement.

Would would um would um those multi-generational properties be legal short-term rentals?

They could if they register and if they're you know, whatever we want to choose to do.

If we want to limit the number of days, um, that somebody can have a, you know, rent a place out for short term.

There's a qu quite a range, or it could just be all year, somebody could just have a unit.

So it depends on our it's sort of there's policy decisions to be made around uh how we register them and what rules we set up.

I'm just thinking the ADUs, you know, short-term rental, like if those multi-generational units are legal short-term rentals, why aren't they legal ADUs or how do we make them legal ADUs?

Um going off on a tangent here, maybe, but this is still sounds like there's two parts of this conversation.

One is to figure out our short-term rental criteria, and the second one is then if we're gonna tax would be part of that.

I wonder also if um maybe this would have been a question for Jason or you can follow up with them.

Do we cause any voter confusion if we have both the recenter tax and the um short term rental tax?

So likely we don't because they're so different.

Um they're just vastly different taxes, and the ballot language is going to be vastly different between the two of them.

Um that hasn't in in my experience in running ballot um surveys and then seeing the results of them, that hasn't become a problem.

Um it's it's more about the appetite.

I also think if you were to still run the two of these, one of them is very more likely to affect the residents, and one of them is more likely to affect visitors more.

Um, the lodging tax being the one to affect visitors more than residents.

Um so that does also lend itself to being an easy vote for both if you were if you were inclined to approve both, because it wouldn't hit you in both ways.

So this is a conversation we've had recently, uh as recently as last week at senior lunch, but then over the years too, um kind of on both sides.

So more recently people are wanting to rent out their home for for um sundance, and asking me, do we have a list?

Do we are we putting it out there?

Are we working with Boulder County or Boulder or other municipalities about what rentals are available and those kinds of things?

Um, and then also are the regulations that can protect them as homeowners.

Um so the answer of course is no, we don't have any rank, we don't have anything yet.

And then the other conversation I've had several times over the last couple of years is my neighbor rents their house and they don't like it.

Um there's big parties on the weekends, and they want some kind of enforcement around it.

So I do think oddly on both sides of the table that people are looking for us to do something with short-term rentals.

Um so I think it's timely if we could get it done before Sundance.

Um, and then I think it's ongoing and it would benefit the community too to be able to say, you know, here are the parameters at least that everyone is expected to work within.

So I think it's worth pursuing, and I was thinking the same thing that it's it doesn't prevent us supporting also a tax, a sales tax increase because it wouldn't hit the same demographic.

So I'll say um if it feels like that's still it's worth us going down an education and outreach outreach path with the community.

We are of course coming up to our biggest event of the year with town fair.

Um, and I always try to capture that audience as much as I could can while they're there.

So I I would like to have some sort of surveying or information there for them, which is you know, just next weekend on the 16th.

Um so that's why I had drafted a survey already for internal kind of review to make sure that everybody on staff felt okay with it and to be able to at least start the conversation with our public while they're out there.

So I was hoping for a little feedback and feel like the vibes in the room if that feels like something we can do.

Certainly, you have as we do with the other ballot item, the opportunity towards the end of July, early August to decide one way or the other, do you actually want it on the ballot this year or not?

You could certainly decide no, it's not the right time.

We want to wait a year.

That's a perfectly valid things to say, certainly after we get some feedback from the residents.

Um, but I did before uh I went out and just started having a lot of very pointed specific conversations with the residents, wanted to get a sense for if that's okay now that the the topic has expanded from just a hotel.

I think you know, having it if we want to have it in place, you know, before we do have a hotel, that certainly makes sense, although that's gonna be potentially years down the line.

But um, I I don't think as far as the short-term rentals, I mean, typically that's a type of thing that if it gets increased, they're gonna pass that on to the end user.

So I don't I can't imagine us getting a bunch of backlash on that.

Um, I think the policy area is something, yeah, we definitely want to look at, but I think those can be done in tandem.

So I'd I'd be fine.

Like I think it's fine having it on this ballot if um and it might it might be advantageous just to get it out of the way.

But the back lesson that I would see is uh like on number bad sort of neighbors partying and I I've heard well, yeah.

That yeah, that's the that's the policy end of it, yeah.

And that's certainly and I uh on that end, I'm kind of curious too, like, because I'm assuming some communities like in their covenants, they may have um rules against short-term rurals that I assume would would that override any municipal rule that we uh if if uh in other words, if if uh uh if if uh HOA had a rule saying you know, you you're no short-term rurals for longer than five days or something, and and ours was more lenient.

That the HOA could enforce their well, we're not really talking about restricting them, we're just defining them and saying sure, yeah.

This is our text.

I don't think we're gonna over override anything.

There they'd still probably be subject to their HOAs.

Sure, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, so that is that is correct.

It's a separate legal agreement between a homeowner and their association.

Yeah, we would not be involved in anything.

Okay, right.

We would only enforce the rules we put in place.

But we would we would have the conversation is you know, how restrictive do we want to be?

What are the concerns we have around opening up you know, ADUs or other types of units or homes?

And um, or we could be pretty open about it and then eventually get more restrictive if if it's if it proves to be an issue.

So I I guess my question would be could could we uh have the ballot language for the tax and then and then whatever the enforcement issues, those types of things we can handle separately.

Those would be separate, yes.

So I think I saw in the news recently that they've just repealed their short-term rental being.

Yeah, I think they're just uh creating a licensing program for students.

So that was what we were looking for.

Is it only for a certain no?

I think it's alert us that they're happening anyway.

Yes, so they're just gonna create a process now whereby people can register.

Okay.

It's the same thing here.

There they exist.

Yeah, yeah, and I will say as as the news stories increase about Sundance and the logistics around it.

My team is getting questions on social media and email and in other places about this.

How do we register?

What does it look like?

Um, what does it cost for us?

So it's definitely getting a lot of buzz, and we are close enough that I think it matters geographically what we do.

Yeah, so I'm I'm okay with getting the data and figuring it out.

I do want to make sure, I think it's more along the lines of uh Councilmember O'Connor's questions, that we don't go forward with this, and then we have to hire a bunch of people or a bunch of enforcement or whichever it is, and the revenue we bring in doesn't come anywhere close to paying for the program.

Well, and that can be a separate discussion as well.

We can we can build the framework and say here's what we want, and then well, we can decide how strictly we want to enforce it.

So I think we should probably continue.

It's it's inevitable, I think that's gonna happen.

You know, certainly before we get a hotel.

Um, and I don't see a reason to be an outlier with in the region.

Um so I think just carrying on creating that framework and what what some of the questions are for the policy uh makes sense.

All right.

Um you need I do.

Thank you very much.

All right, we will move on to our second topic uh three.

This one is item 2026 191, K Line Road, Highway 7, Raphael Road Station feasibility study update.

Uh staff swap in and out here.

So I'll sit over here.

Well right, and I'll turn it over to John Ferruzi, our transportation and mobility manager.

Thank you.

Good evening, Council and Mayor.

We are here tonight to talk a little bit about the Count Line Road Extension Feasibility Study and Airport North South connectivity study as well as how we've phrased it.

Tonight we'll be presenting the results of our airport north-south connectivity study with the analysis that we've done for a potential new roadway connecting near Erie Air Park with a focus on improving direct access to and from Colorado 7.

I'm joined here with Miguel Aguilar, Principal Transmission Planner from the town of Erie, as well as our team members from DJA.

I'll let them introduce themselves, then we'll jump into a couple of uh items related to our roadmap here.

Uh good evening, Mayor, members of the council.

I'm Bill Dilo at DJA, and I was the project manager on the consultant team side.

I'm Mike Dagler with DJ and A.

I'm also I'm assisting Bill.

Yeah.

So just to get things started on the next slide.

Maybe I can use them now.

Perfect.

Okay, there we go.

Yes, thank you.

Um so tonight we're gonna walk you through some of our key findings uh related to the study that we've conducted.

Um this is our roadmap for for the presentation and some of the information that we're gonna be presenting.

Uh we'll move through the study overview as well as the timeline for the for the project, and uh we'll uh provide information on the short list that we have related to our efforts.

Um we are gonna explain how we got to the alternatives and how we evaluated those uh for the process, and we'll uh provide information about the feasibility study results as well as our recommendations for you to consider.

Uh so let's see here.

Yes, so um just uh a few um items related to a location of our study.

We're evaluating the feasibility of a new roadway connection near AirPart uh airport, EIK, focusing on direct connectivity to and from Colorado 7.

Our objectives are to evaluate the overall roadway network analysis in this area as part of that uh review process and screening.

Uh the study looks at existing but also forecast traffic growth, and we did look at the land uses associated with the area.

So we took into all the information related to uh land that is uh either proposed for development, has plans, or is in the existing condition developing and has uh operations on it.

Um as part of the uh process, we also look to identify the direct connections, all the possible opportunities in the area, and we considered some of the emergency response related issues associated where, for example, the fire department and other resources are positioned in relationship to the airport and other um uh uses in the area.

Uh we are as part of the feasibility analysis looking to improve access, uh, but also uh consider the circulation and and uh traffic growth and demand in the area, as well as uh reducing the residential traffic impacts, which has been part of the consideration for all the um analysis that we're doing and the feedback that we heard during the engagement process.

Um our motto is keeping regional traffic on regional roads and keeping local traffic on local streets.

So that's that's our approach generally, and we took that approach with this uh analysis process just to make sure it's covered.

So with that, I'll hand it over to Bill, and we'll go get through the details here.

Okay.

Thanks, John.

Uh so yeah, as John mentioned, I'll be walking through the uh alternatives development process, the analysis process that we did looking at uh feasibility for the uh the roadway extension.

Uh we looked at and identified really four primary alternatives that were evaluated as part of this effort.

Alternative zero.

Um first one is what's considered to be the baseline feature condition.

So this would be the uh roadway improvements, new roadways, roadway expansions that are proposed as part of the transportation master plan, uh, and those feature improvements within the uh the project area.

Alternative A, which we'll talk a little bit more about on the next slide, is a connection that would connect County Line Road uh to airport drive, cross over Cole Creek, and then move uh south and east uh to Airport Drive.

Alternative B looked at a more direct connection to Highway 7, uh basically more of a straight north-south uh alignment for that roadway.

And then we also examined in emergency access route to that would specifically serve the airport with a secondary access primarily for emergency vehicles and would not serve through traffic.

Some of the other items that I'll mention and highlight within the study timeline, the February March time period was when we conducted the community engagement effort.

There were mailers sent out to residents in nearby neighborhoods advertising a community open house that was conducted on February 25th of this year.

We had 22 people that attended that open house and participated, reviewed the alternatives and provide provided their input.

Staff, town staff, Miguel also gave a presentation to the airport board in March to present the different alternatives and receive feedback from the airport board as well.

So this map here outlines the uh the alternatives that I just walked through and provides a little visualization of where they would run.

So you can see alternative zero, we've highlighted in the uh the white.

So all of the uh the roadways that are showing up in white or or yellow are part of the uh baseline future network that will be built out as the town advances improvements and as new developments come online, and those developers implement uh the roadways that they're conditioned to provide as well.

So that includes the future connection of Coal Creek Boulevard, which is really one of the more substantial uh improvements uh within the project area, making that connection uh from its southern terminus right now up to connect to County Line Road.

We show alternatives A and B there in the center of the image, alternative A there in blue, and alternative uh B in pink.

Uh alternative A, as we highlighted, does have that that little uh turn to the east there to connect to Airport Drive, just south of the existing hangars, while alternative B makes that uh direct connection to highway seven.

And then in the green dashed line, we show that secondary emergency access route to the airport.

This slide here highlights the proposed roadway cross section.

Uh one of the key constraints in terms of the alternatives is that there's a very narrow right-of-way available, about 30 to 35 feet of publicly available right-of-way that exists, primarily along the alternative B alignment and route.

And this is uh south of Coal Creek, the actual creek itself.

Once you cross over, head to down towards highway seven.

There's only about 30 to 35 feet of available right-of-way.

So this does allow for a two-lane roadway with a 12-foot travel lane in each direction, but no multimodal infrastructure, no sidewalks, no bike lanes would be able to be provided along this roadway with this cross section unless there was additional right-of-way acquired to accommodate that.

In this location, we do have the Coal Creek Trail.

Uh, so there is multimodal infrastructure that would parallel the uh the roadway alignment and be present in this location.

So this slide shows the estimated uh changes in traffic volumes with both alternative A and alternative B.

So in the black, we've shown the future forecast traffic volumes along different roadways within the project area.

So along Coal Creek Boulevard there on the left, Arapaho Road, and then up on County Line Road as you move to the north, as well as volumes along Vista Parkway there to the east.

In green, we show locations where there's a reduction in forecast future traffic volumes with the one of the two alternatives implemented.

Uh, and in the red or pink color, we show where there would be an increase in traffic.

So, really key items to highlight here.

The alternatives A and B, that north-south connection really helps to potentially reduce traffic along Coal Creek Boulevard, provides a shorter distance of travel, a little bit shorter travel time.

And so we do see the potential for diversion of traffic away from the feature alignment of Coal Creek Boulevard to this corridor.

There's more limited uh estimated redistribution from Vista Parkway, primarily because the overall distance traveled and the time of travel between alternative A and B and the current condition along Vista Parkway is not very different.

So it the these alternatives add a little bit more friction, I think, to that travel.

You have a few more turns that you would need to make as a driver if you were, for example, heading south on County Line Road for taking that alignment versus Vista Parkway.

And so we don't see a very significant potential diversion of traffic away from Vista.

Most of it comes from uh Col Creek Boulevard.

Before we move on, can you can you say again what ADT stands for?

Yes, average daily traffic.

So this is the daily number of uh vehicles that would be traveling on the roadways.

Thank you.

Yeah, thank you for.

Yeah, if I use an acronym and transportation person, I love my acronym.

So yeah, feel free to chime in if uh I use one that you need a definition.

So the next two slides will talk a little bit about provide some more details around alternative A and alternative B in terms of the concept design.

And Mike and his team led the development of these concept designs.

One of the key items here, we show alternative A.

There's a few key elements of the uh design that we wanted to highlight.

First and foremost is the crossing of Coal Creek.

Uh in pink there, we show the existing floodplain for Cole Creek.

So you go out there today, Cole Creek's a very narrow, small, you know, most days a trickle of water out there today, or very limited amount of water, but the overall floodplain and potential for water flow within the creek and within the creek bed is quite quite substantial.

And this really does add in a very high risk element to both um alternative A and alternative B in terms of being able to cross that floodplain and interfere with that floodplain as little as possible.

Both alternatives would require additional hydraulic modeling and analysis to look at the impacts of a bridge over the floodplain that's out of the scope of the uh the current effort, but it's certainly something that we've flagged here as part of this this process to highlight the risk there.

We've assumed that the design would bridge over the full floodplain, so there would still be impacts in the floodplain from the columns associated with the bridge, but we would try and minimize those impacts as much as possible by limiting it to just those particular locations.

But it still does require modeling.

There's still approval by FEMA that would be required, and there's still potential for impacts to the floodplain, uh, even with the just columns.

And about how long is the bridge?

The bridge is over under over 800 feet long, about 840 feet long.

Wow.

So it's quite a wide floodplain there.

So it is a high risk element to the concept and making this connection here.

And you can see to the north and to the south, it's it's a pretty wide floodplain throughout.

So there's not really, it's not just that this location is worse than others.

It's pretty consistent throughout the corridor here.

As we looked at, it's not shown here, but the uh emergency access has almost similar, I think it's about 700 feet that we'd have to cross there, so north.

So the floodplain stays pretty wide throughout uh this part along Coal Creek.

Uh, another item to point out with alternative A is that turn to the east there in the connection to airport drive.

Once the roadway turns east, it's no longer in public right-of-way.

So that would require acquisition of private property in order to be able to make that connection, and that would certainly have a cost and and potential impact to property owners as well.

I'm sorry, where is that?

That is just the the little hook to the east, just south of the existing hangars, the three vertical buildings, you know, that look like you know, three Roman numerals there.

And we make that connection to Airport Drive.

And then at the bottom at the south end of the image, we've shown the planned traffic signal at the intersection of airport drive and highway seven.

That is a developer conditioned traffic signal that'll be implemented and paid for by development in the area.

And so this alternative utilizes that connection and uses that future traffic signal uh to provide movements at highway seven.

So alternative B looks very similar at the north end in terms of that connection and crossing of Coal Creek.

Uh same length of bridge, same crossing in that location.

Where it differs is down there just south of the three hangars.

In this case, um, alternative B would continue along in the available public right-of-way, that 30 to 35 foot available strip of right-away, and then make a connection down to highway seven at the south.

We've shown instead here that uh east-west horizontal dashed black line that could be a potential connection to provide connectivity from airport drive to alternative B.

But again, that would require acquisition of um private property.

It's not publicly owned right away in order to be able to uh to make that connection.

The other key item here is the relocation of the traffic signal to the intersection of alternative B and Highway 7.

So in this case, the the town would be responsible for implementing the traffic signal.

And the benefit or kind of objective with that connection from Airport Drive is that then you're opening up full movement at highway seven for the existing and planned businesses along Airport Drive.

So what question there because I thought, as you mentioned in the previous slide, that the uh at Airport Drive that was a developer condition light.

And I thought they were already the infrastructure's already there for them to put in the light.

Or they're working on that now.

The infrastructure is currently not there for a traffic signal.

Um CDOT has uh issued a permit uh previously.

There was no action taken on it, and in fact, that permit has expired since.

Oh, okay.

All right.

Are you talking about airport and highway seven?

Yes.

I thought that's a condition of the development that the CO, the light has to go in.

So written in the DA for the ERI Air Project Track W.

There is a condition that once they get to the certain threshold that triggers the warrant for the signal that uh signal will be constructed at that location.

It is not there now.

The infrastructure is not in place yet.

So that's why we're saying it's a developer condition signal.

So that is a condition of the of the existing project that's going on right now, though.

Um, is once that warrant is met, it will be installed.

But I'm sorry, you said it's conditioned on volume.

Yes.

But it a change to that, would that require a DA amendment?

Or is it change would require a DNA amendment?

Okay.

So the change to the conditions or what we were working on with the developer for a light at airport.

Correct.

Okay, so I'm confused.

Rewind the tape a little bit.

Let me go back to what David was saying.

Assuming the development that's happening right now, where we have the condition in there that the light goes in at airport and highway seven.

Is there forget about any changes?

Is there any reason that light will not go in there?

We do not anticipate that that light will not go in at this time.

The only way that would happen is if we don't hit the threshold for whatever reason.

The traffic warrant threshold.

Okay.

This is separate from this conversation.

Right.

Okay.

So assuming there's going to be a light at airport drive, it's highly unlikely that CDOT would approve a second light, correct?

Correct.

Yes.

So yeah, that was actually the next uh item to highlight is yeah, those two streets if alternative B was pursued.

Alternative B, its location and the location of Airport Drive is doesn't meet C DOT's requirements in terms of spacing uh of traffic signals.

In fact, alternative B is pretty close.

Uh I don't think it meets either to Col Creek Boulevard.

It's pretty close to meeting that requirement.

So, but there would still be a process required with C DOT to go through and get an exemption to say you know we're within that half mile distance that they permit.

Uh and so would this be allowed?

So that is one of the risks with all another risk with alternative B is it would require a new process with CDOT to get that access and that traffic signal permitted and have them approve, you know, basically the relocation of a plan signal at Airport Drive over to Alternative B.

This slide um highlights again the different uh floodplain considerations we wanted to make sure we walk through these.

We do see this one as one of the higher risk elements for both alternatives.

So we highlighted that there is that wide uh floodplain for Full Creek.

Um, any new crossing, regardless of the number of columns or potential impact, does require FEMA review uh and approval, and that uh more detailed um hydraulic analysis and modeling of the floodplain to see how it changes with uh whatever impacts or impediments uh that a bridge would implement uh into the floodplain.

Uh one of the you know kind of unanswered questions at this point is you know what those impacts are, would they FEMA require mitigations?

Would it potentially impact existing other uh properties that are nearby or other buildings?

It's unknown at this point what those potential impacts would be.

Um but at this stage we've tried to um outline a bridge design uh that has as little impact as possible.

Um, and hence when we get into some of the costs, um, why the when you have a a longer uh higher bridge with fewer columns, that typically is more expensive than if you were able to build embankments and have a shorter bridge.

So you'll see that in a few slides with the estimates in terms of construction costs.

And that's uh what we highlighted here.

We looked at several elements related to cost, not only the cost to construct the roadway extension and the bridge, but also maintaining it over a 20 to 30 year period, and use that information along with the traffic inputs in terms of redistribution of traffic, travel time savings, safety, and other elements to develop and complete a benefit cost analysis.

This benefit cost analysis followed the U.S.

Department of Transportation's methodology that they use for their funding grant applications and decisions on whether to fund projects that apply for federal grants.

So kind of walking through this table from top to bottom, the capital costs there up at the top, about 50 million dollars to implement the roadway extension.

Vast majority of that cost is in the bridge.

That is the major cost component of that improvement.

The airport access there we show over on the right, again, a much uh shorter roadway, a shorter bridge.

And so estimated about 29 million dollars for the implementation of that improvement.

Maintenance costs for both the roadway and the bridge annually would average about 200,000 a year.

That wouldn't happen in every year.

You know, each element has its own useful life in terms of repaving inspections and improvements to the bridge.

But on an average basis, it's about 200,000 a year, is about what it works out to.

The vehicle miles travel reduction.

This is looking at the redistribution of traffic that we showed back several slides ago, looking at what that volume was on a daily basis and the shortened distance that those vehicles would need to travel, primarily those cars shifting from Coal Creek Boulevard to the new roadway extension.

And so that's about seven to eight thousand miles a day, averaged across all of the traffic in the future.

And there's about two minutes of travel time savings between the two alternatives and travel today on Col Creek Boulevard.

Again, primarily a result of that shorter distance traveled and a little bit less time spent on highway seven, which does have higher levels of congestion and delay.

The next two lines, the commercial industrial land use benefit and the residential land use benefit.

I did want to point out on the commercial industrial land use benefit.

That's uh estimated economic benefit over the next 20 years from uh development that's already planned in the air park area.

So the the roadway extension itself will have more than likely very little influence on that development, just because a lot of that development is already entitled, it's already planned, um, already has access through uh various components and locations along Airport Drive or County Line Road.

Uh so we expect that uh 26 million or so that's estimated there to be you know pretty much the same, whether the the alignment is implemented or not.

And you really kind of see that with the emergency access.

That's kind of the no build scenario, about 25 million, and that you get a slight bump with the uh the alternative A and B just in terms of that economic benefit.

On the residential side, that economic benefit or output impact that's identified there is primarily a result of travel time savings for existing and new residents.

Doesn't necessarily spur additional or new residential growth.

It's more the kind of the opportunity cost for residents uh within the project area, and again, that's spread over a 20-year time horizon per the uh USDOT requirements.

And so then at the bottom, really get to the key item with the benefit cost ratio.

You can see about uh 0.42 to 0.53 in terms of benefit cost.

When USDOT evaluates federal grant applications, they're really looking for projects that have a benefit cost of one or greater.

And basically, what that typically means is that the project brings in more benefits than the cost it takes to build and maintain it.

So if a project has a number that's below one, it costs more to build and maintain it than the economic benefit that it provides for the particular study area.

So all three alternatives are below one, and so would if you know the town was to advance one of these alternatives, pursue federal grant funding for its implementation.

It would probably be very hard to be competitive against other projects.

A lot of times projects that are funded are actually above 1.5 and above in terms of their rating and then being awarded funding.

So it would be challenging just in terms of competitiveness.

And then some of the other key findings, really building on the uh the previous slide and that benefit cost analysis.

Since we're below 0.5 for both alternative A and alternative B, likely not competitive using the uh US Department of Transportation criteria, which as I mentioned looks at safety time, economic development versus that cost.

The travel time compared to Coal Creek Boulevard is about two minutes of savings on average for drivers utilizing the roadway.

And there are a lot of risks with both alternatives A and B.

We've highlighted those there in the pink, the high risk elements, such as the floodplain impacts, which we really think is the highest risk element, environmental approvals, that's a moderate risk crossing the creek.

There's potential impacts to natural resources, aquatic resources, endangered species that would all need to be looked at and evaluated.

As we mentioned, that C dot coordination that's required with the connection to Highway 7, getting approval if that was a new connection with alternative B.

And then the impact to uh planned or entitled land uses, especially with alternative A making that connection over to Airport Drive and the requirement for uh private property acquisition to it in order to make that happen.

The signaling would only be a high risk for option A for alternative for alternate B, correct.

Thank you, Bill.

Yeah, so just uh summarizing the the study and the effort that we put forward.

We wanted to uh screen all the information, make sure what we bring to the table uh shows kind of the end result associated with what we were asked to do and see where the potential connectivity makes sense and how that would work.

Uh bringing that back, you know, we we've discovered that uh it's a roughly 50 million dollar investment in either alternative that would uh work in this particular area for about a two minutes of uh travel time savings compared to the Cole Creek connection in the same vicinity.

And as part of that process, um we want we have our economists on this team helping analyze the benefit costs associated with the um uh project, looking out into the future, making sure we're taking a comprehensive and holistic approach, considering maintenance and other aspects of the process.

And uh those ratios are uh as previously mentioned um 0.5 at best, and and so it's not a strong benefit cost uh result from the feasibility study here.

Um the risk is also substantial, and this is where we wanted to come to the table, provide information about the regulatory agencies, how we have to basically work through them and what that means with a location like this where there is uh FAA and FEMA and other kinds of factors, C dots uh involved, it's it's worth as part of the screening process to share that with you.

Uh ultimately, uh as staff recommendation, we don't recommend alternative A or Biven the results that we have arrived at with the analysis that we're looking at.

Um we have a recommendation essentially to complete the build out of uh Coal Creek Boulevard through the developer process that that's already in play.

Um it's it's already in motion, so uh moving forward with that.

And then there are improvements to Vista Parkway investments that are ongoing currently, and um it'd be worthwhile to complete those, as well as um the airport drive signal and uh planned investment with redevelopment, uh, that that's already in play as well, and we'd recommend uh moving forward with that, given that it's already in motion.

And then also today, uh just as part of the um process that we have with other development.

We we're looking at parallel roads, the the shared and connection is also something that we submitted to the region.

It's been accepted as as a connection for truck traffic, and that wasn't, I think part of the original impetus for understanding does it make sense to look at this, and um that also has a factor in all this too.

So if we can get trucks to use more of a truck route directly to and from a landfill, for example, that part of this equation also is something that we're initially looking at and considering as a potential need in this area, Sheridan you know, provides that that better connection in this vicinity.

So, with that, we will open it up to questions and discussion.

Uh, how however you know you'd like to proceed on this, we were available as a technical resource too to provide uh feedback.

All right, great, thank you.

Appreciate the information.

Um, I do have a number of questions, and I'm guessing other people uh may as well.

I want to frame this first as this whole conversation got started simply because people were upset about the traffic that has continued to increase in Erie.

Um, and it's been increasing because we have more and more people moving in on the existing roads.

I think it's also because in the IGA with Lafayette, part of the agreement, part of our giveaway, was that we would shut down county line road and allow Lafayette to take over that portion of county line to service uh their wastewater facility.

With that, um my understanding is that traffic flows, those going south on county line, and wanted to go east on highway seven, started to go down Vista Parkway instead.

And I I thought that was a significant increase, but the numbers you're showing me here tonight are not indicating that that was a significant increase.

So that's my first question, right?

Was the premise for us actually starting this conversation simply wrong?

So what happened when County Line Road got shut down?

What happened to the traffic counts out on um Vista Parkway?

I think a lot of that was just oh yes, yeah, that's the staff.

Yeah, I think as part of the analysis and what we've modeled, we've modeled the build-out condition here.

So I have to look back to see what happened with traffic trends associated with uh closure of that dog leg, you know, my diagonal section.

Um I don't have that information available right now.

All right, because that was a significant part of this.

I'll speak to that a little bit.

Um, just having been there through that process, um, we can absolutely follow up with you on this further.

But um when the Col Creek or when County Line Road was closed, and there was the new condition of Colt Creek Boulevard, and also the leg of Monroe that was open.

Um, obviously it takes time for people to adjust to new traffic patterns.

So there's there's an element of that that had occurred.

There's also an element of Can I pause you and have them put slide uh shortlisted alternatives would build out?

Yeah, so that the roads when you're saying them absolutely see what you're talking about.

Um so there is a level of what drivers need to adjust to new patterns.

This one that one before that.

Uh do we have a different set in our death?

Not who's up there.

It wasn't that one.

That's right.

So the other thing that we did find is that despite our desire to have traffic routed a certain way during construction and deconstruction of County Line Road, Google Maps was taking them through Vista Parkway.

So I do think that during the construction timeline that it was reflective that there was a noticeable increase in traffic along Vista Parkway.

Part of the efforts that we had since then was to study Vista Parkway in a corridor study.

We made sure that we were looking at that holistically, which was kind of the impetus for some of the improvements that we're doing along that corridor.

Um we did show, however, that in that corridor study that Vista Parkway, while seeing an increase in traffic was not operating beyond its capacity limits.

So it was operating within its ability to operate.

There was no overcapacity um concerns from that perspective from a data perspective.

Um through to build out or currently currently and through build out.

Okay.

Um in addition to that, once we noticed also that the construction traffic was not detouring the way that we had preferred, we did reach out.

I worked with communications to reach out to Google to say, hey, can we please show this as the preferred diversion route?

Um, which through a couple of efforts of trying to get their attention, we did eventually get them to do so.

Um, but you know, in the meantime, we still saw those increases in traffic.

Um I'm not gonna say that there wasn't an increase in traffic.

I would believe the people that live there on a daily basis saw an increase in traffic.

Um, but I will say that from our observations, we weren't saying anything that was beyond the capacity of the road from a data perspective.

All right, we have somebody that lives right on this road that may or may not want to comment here.

I did notice an increase, um, but I also noticed an increase in well, behavior in the circles and how um oftentimes well no, that's not the right way, right way to say it, but I would since the closure of County Line Road, um I was probably hit almost five times or so using those circles the way that you know you're supposed to enter circles, so I have definitely noticed a change in behavior.

Yeah.

So hopefully the improvements on Vista Parkway can help that.

Yeah, you'll help that.

And I will say that the data that we found in the corridor story for for Vista Parkway did show some of the inappropriate behavior.

I do think that was reflective at the roundabouts, which is why we're looking to make improvements specifically at the roundabouts, but also looking to do a road diet further south towards highway seven to kind of discourage that as a through route as well, um, kind of reflective of what it's supposed to be as a um collector road and not a arterial road.

So that is part of our goal, and that's part of why we're recommending let's stay the course on those improvements to Vista Parkway to make sure that it is safe and it's being utilized appropriately.

So okay, my next question, just clarification.

Um, what was the square footage cost that you used to come up with the 50 million dollar bridge?

Um I can speak to that.

I well, the the bridge cost was roughly about half, a little bit more than half of that 50 million dollars, and we use 775 or 750 per square foot for cost.

And how did you come up with the 750 dollars per square foot?

And let me just give you a premise.

Okay, I'm not an expert in this.

So I'm using my friend G, and I'm asking Gemini what is the average cost?

And they not only are giving me an average cost of about 365, but they're giving me bridges that are being built right now or have been built in the recent time frame that are roughly in that frame.

So if you're using a 750, that would take it up to about 24 million, which is how I'm doing the calculations on this, but it still seems double, at least on what the information that is out there with current or recent projects that CDOT has approved.

So help me understand that that's a big discrepancy.

Yeah, I agree with that.

Uh so prior to my employment with DGNA, I worked 24 years with the Federal Highway Administration.

Um, and one of my former co-workers with the Federal Highway Administration is also over DJ, and I had conversations again.

These are planning level estimates, so we didn't do a deep dive.

Um, and so I I had conversations with uh with our senior structural engineer, and that is the I guess we used with the federal highway administration as a realistic cost per square foot, and that includes that includes the the entire bridge structure, superstructure and substructure.

Can you send us that information that was used for the basis of the 750?

I think that'd be helpful because it's more expensive to build a bridge in Colorado.

So the number that I'm using, that 365 appears to be more than what the federal um highway administration would be using across America in general.

And so, however, you came up with that 750, wherever it came from, it would be good to really understand that.

And then my question to John is if the cost of the bridge is actually half of what's baked in here, do those numbers, those ratios that need to be, I think you said roughly one, and they're roughly a half.

Do those are those proportional?

So would it jump up to whatever 0.75, 0.8, 0.9, if the cost of the bridge was actually half of what is being discussed here.

There's a few different inputs because also the the maintenance of the bridge factors in that.

So it's not a one-to-one increase.

Um we did look at uh as part of the process there that we've gone through, some less uh what could be less expensive bridges.

Um, and even then you're maybe getting to one, but not really there because of the other costs, the other limitations.

So even with a substantially less expensive bridge, even if it was more than half less, you're still not getting back to one.

Okay, which I would just one thing that I just add on the bridge item two, is it also I think reflects the um objective of minimizing that impact to the floodplain.

So the longer distances you assume for columns, we're trying to have as few columns in the floodplain as possible.

That also makes a bridge more expensive.

So that direct kind of per square foot cost is difficult to do in different locations because each bridge is really unique just in terms of the total conditions that exist.

Yeah, totally.

Um which was a perfect lead into my next question.

You couldn't set this up any better.

Thank you.

If you flip to the next slide, um I'm by the way, those at home that are see me pointing and pointing to the screen.

Uh, it's the one with the floodplain that shows the bridge going over it.

Uh one more back.

It's the one that actually shows the pink.

It's on 16.

This year.

I don't know why I can't see the slide numbers in my uh potential.

Yeah, that's it.

Yep.

Yeah, it would work.

Okay, so when I look at this, it looks like um the route chosen is absolutely the longest route you could possibly take to get across the floodplain.

So when I look at this, it's going diagonal across the floodplain.

Could the bridge be shifted so you're more perpendicular to the floodplain?

So that the bridge length goes from 840 feet to whatever 440 feet, 500 feet, and actually the span you were talking about becomes simpler and reduces the cost more dramatically.

So maybe the way to really ask that is why did you choose that route?

Yeah, I can start like I'm sure you have some shots too.

Yep.

But one of the big drivers is the intersection of County Line Road and Monroe up there.

Okay.

Uh fitting a roundabout in that location and keeping that roundabout out of the floodplain, and then also having the the geometries approach geometries and everything with that roundabout as well uh being able to work properly.

Um if you'd add in.

I guess I can I can say we we did initially start with I guess sub-alternate um concepts where we had we didn't have a roundabout, uh, and and there were like regular T type intersections, and in that case, you would be able to be more on a north-south alignment, which would which would reduce that bridge length some.

Um I guess the other point I would like to I guess add to the roundabout option is in order to have that roundabout um operate effectively, you need to have you need to have a larger angle between the individual um lengths of the roundabout.

So you you you couldn't have that um bridge alignment be north south because you you're effectively like crowding that other leg for Monroe Street.

So we had to we had to push that out to the east, which creates that that skewed to the floodplain.

I have other follow-up questions, but they're but they're they're gonna be more detailed because when I look at where Monroe and East County line, Cole Creek is actually far to the east, and it looks like there's a lot of room.

I'm sure there's topography questions there.

I'm just trying to figure out was the most expensive option ultimately chosen for various reasons, and are there less expensive options that could be pursued that would actually change the calculus on this.

I'll mention this.

I I think from the objective of having County Line Road extend to highway seven, we have this alternative, alternative A and alternative B, which is a little bit more direct of a connection.

And our goal is to, as part of the evaluation process and the uh benefit cost analysis to see if the travel time savings with a direct connection to County Line Road would give us better results with a more direct connection.

Right.

I did the travel time thing.

Yeah, yeah.

So if if we're moving things, shifting them from one place to another, it's affecting things on the other end as you have kind of like trade-offs essentially.

Um if, for example, we're coming in at a different angle to Monroe and have a different type of intersection.

Um the stop control, the type of intersection with the potential signal, for example, other things, those start to add either travel time or they start to add costs and other things.

Our goal was to try to make this work as best as possible, given the configuration of County Lane Road, north-south and what we have along that corridor.

I think another factor into this too is the floodplain.

So while Cole Creek is further to the east, the floodplain abut County Line Road and Monroe for a significant portion right there.

So moving that down would cause impacts into the floodplain, which would cause impacts to adjacent properties as well.

So with the goal of trying to minimize impact through this evaluation process, we we looked for an opportunity to say, okay, this connection point is outside of the hundred-year floodplain.

It's in the 500-year floodplain, but that's not as heavily regulated as the 100-year floodplain.

And that way we can actually have a chance to make the connection, also create a chance for that bridge to actually start making its way to span the floodplain as well.

So that was kind of some of the more direct answers.

It's a lot of nuance.

Now we have to chase it through this floodplain of how is it impacting all these adjacent property owners as well.

Sure.

This floodplain is wide.

And when I'm looking at what you're showing me right here, um, I have some other questions, but we'll let other people chime in and I got a few questions.

So as far as the right of way, we talk about a 35-foot.

What uh what are the constraints around that?

I I understood that there was uh a 60-foot easement down the county line road.

Uh if we carried it straight, half of it was owned by Lafayette, half of it owned by Erie is Lafayette easement the constraint, or did you find it in the scenes?

We in the research that we did, we didn't find that Lafayette uh easement.

So, in the interest of being conservative in terms of the available right-of-way, we we went with utilize the basically the town's easement or town's ride of way in that location.

So if you know potentially there was you know that easement, uh a similar kind of mirror image on the other side.

You know, certainly the roadway could be expanded, but expanding the roadway expanding the money makes it cost more money as well.

Exactly.

Yeah, understood.

I'm just uh yeah, I want to understand the constraints and not looking for a wider, more expensive road.

Um, I was glad to see that uh the road uh lanes were were 12 foot wide, right?

That's a standard you know high volume uh because I I think in the community meeting they're only like 10 feet or something like that.

So, yeah, thanks.

Thanks for taking that feedback and and rolling it into this.

That's great.

Um, yeah, I would like to understand the traffic on Vista Parkway before we close County Line Road versus uh now because you know, as there had been a lot of concerns about the increase, and we're only showing about a half a percent decrease um if we if we put an alternate road in.

So that information before and after County Line Road was close would be helpful.

Um let's see.

Uh and then you show the the floodplain is high high impact.

Um but you're planning on on a bridge that'll minimize that, right?

So what are we taking out some of that risk by the design or trying to understand the uh the design concept, yes, that's presented here, uh, tries to with the information that we have today, minimize that risk as much as possible.

As we mentioned, there'd still be a detailed modeling effort that would need to be done, and it's possible even the design concept like this could potentially have impacts to um adjacent properties.

We don't really know until that modeling effort uh occurs, and there's still also a uh process and review with FIBA that's required, regardless of the the alternatives, yeah, uh, and just kind of you know experience from other projects that even before the last couple years and federal staffing reductions was a very lengthy process.

Yeah, we can imagine all the environmental concerns.

And then there's the environmental concerns like that are gonna keep making a challenge.

Um yeah, because like uh the mayor said, one of the big things about looking at this was to alleviate some of the traffic that was generated on Vista Parkway, but also reduce the traffic, you know, going through the neighborhood of Parkdale.

Um, you know, with uh and there's also a possible future school that's gonna be along uh Col Creek Boulevard.

So you know, those were some of the reasons that you know we're looking at this as well as of a potential economic um you know improvement or economic development opportunities along the gateway, you know, one of the gateways into Erie.

I would like to speak really quickly if it's okay to uh some of the improvements that we're working through with the developer for Parkdale to make that a safer corridor, especially um near the school, if I may.

Yeah.

Um so obviously we remember from the presentation that there's a roundabout that's going to be going in near the school, which will help to slow speed down speeds down along that corridor around the school specifically.

In addition to that, we're putting um rapid flashing beacons on that roundabout, similar to what we have done at County Line Road.

Um it's becoming more common practice, and that creates a safer uh surface crossing at the roundabout.

But our primary mode of safety for pedestrian and cyclist travel will be an underpass that we're working with the developer to design and construct as part of that project.

So the goal would be to divert all pedestrian and bicycle traffic off of the road entirely into an underpass to cross that road.

That way there's not any conflicts.

The the surface crossing at that point would just be in case you know, for whatever reason there's a storm and the pumps break and a perfect storm of events happen where that uh underpass is not able to be utilized.

So I do want to make sure that you're you're uh that we're conveying to you all that we are hearing the concerns around safety along Cole Creek Boulevard, especially near the school when we're working with the developer to mitigate those risks.

Yeah, and I appreciate all the work that's being done.

And we're not suggesting any thing be slowed down or changed in that absolute by any means.

Uh so yeah, thank you.

Yeah, absolutely.

Um, and about how long is you know alternate A and as far as miles or you know distance it's kind of yeah, I know I'm trying to remember that number.

Well, I want to say we're we're less than a mile overall in this distance.

Um I think we're we're more in the neighborhood of about I would estimate around three quarters um to about a mile, three quarters of a mile to a mile.

That connection.

You know, part of this is psychological.

But if you're going south and you want to go east, and you know you've got to go west by half mile, and go back a half mile, then it's like I'm just gonna go fist to parkway.

Anyway, that's I think some people may be doing that.

Yeah, I think human nature, right?

It's yeah, I'm gonna find the quickest shortest path.

And no matter no matter what.

What is happening is that well, prior to the construction on Airport Drive.

Um I was told that people were actually taking Main Street up and cutting through those businesses and crossing an active taxiway and making their way to drive.

No way.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, it's been an enforcement issue that we've been working on.

So for most part, we use these maps, Google that look at psychological most people the blame maps in the days.

Yeah, if you don't live here, I can probably see the Google thing.

If you live here, yeah.

If you're my husband, Google every day, everywhere we're from his house to the grocery store.

Yeah, I do that.

That's true.

I don't I know that it works.

I know there's yeah.

So the width of the road, it sounds like it's pretty narrow.

Is that against our engineering standards?

Um, our engineering standards call for basically a wider roadway for the type of volume that we have assigned to connect between the highway and countline road.

So, yes, it is narrower.

We have stripped out basically the majority of the multimodal elements, so there's no sidewalk, there's no bike lane, there are only buffers, you know, basically in the area, uh, a little in the center, a little bit on the edges, that 10, 11 feet that Kelsey Miller Mordorella was talking about was increased, you know, just because um what we tried to do is keep the cost as reasonable as possible with the footprint of a smaller bridge and smaller roadway, knowing that there's a trail uh in that same vicinity to serve the multimodal.

So it goes, yes, it goes against our engineering standards the way they're currently uh shown in our entering documents.

We try to preserve the functionality while limiting the impact to whatever right-of-way we think can work in this particular area.

So it is a much narrower type of work.

So what an engineer put their stamp on it?

Yeah, I mean, um, I'll I'll speak to that as an engineer.

Um if they were designed to um proper safety criteria and um everything like that, I I would stamp it.

It's just not to the town of Erie standards.

Um so we'd have to make sure that you know any deviation from that is designed appropriately, proper structure elements are designed appropriately, proper laying widths are assigned appropriately.

Um I'll say too, um, there's a level of we'd probably have to evaluate if we were gonna pursue a path forward, um, making sure that uh emergency vehicles can pass by too if there was an accident or if there's somebody stopped on the side of the road.

So we'd have to design some elements of that.

But yes, I'd say just because it doesn't conform to the town of Erie standards doesn't mean that I wouldn't just sign off on it necessarily.

Okay, we would have to just compromise those in favor of the trial nearby.

Yes, um, and then so safety.

I know that that section of Colorado 7 is always read on C DOT's maps.

It's we've had recent cyclist deaths right there at Airport Boulevard.

Um or airport drive.

What is the safety?

I mean, is there is there any enhanced or if we if we're really thinking about safety, is there any benefit that we could realize with A or B.

I think with both A and B, certainly there's a safety benefit that comes with the proposed traffic signal and the controlling the the movements.

I think the airport drive, um highway seven intersection today with the hill and the elevation that you have there and the unprotected or you know, just stop sign movement from airport drive, is it's a very difficult movement, and I think can likely contributes to some of the the safety issues that that CDOT's reporting along highway seven.

So I think the the signal itself would provide a significant amount of improvement there, and then I think the other improvements that C DOT's planning and constructing along highway seven too will also help in that uh respect.

But so that the stoplight is warranted and happening, so this doesn't then change that.

It doesn't have any influence on the safety.

Um let's see.

Uh and then I I do have concerns about alternative B, the signal being so close to Cold Creek Boulevard.

I think we've talked about that before in CDOT has we did in that that's not close enough.

I mean, that's too close for a second signal right there because the airport drive signal barely meets I think distance standards.

Is that different?

Are they compromising with their standards?

There would be uh a process that the town would have to go through with CDOT to basically apply and you know get their approval for the location of the city.

Probably to your point, Councilmember Bear, it is unlikely that CDOT would allow that signal to go in so close to airport drive and Cole Creek Boulevard.

What they would probably propose is um a decommissioning of the airport airport drive signal in favor of this signal.

Keeping airport drive.

I don't know if they'd even allow that to be perfectly candid.

Um it's they're very close together.

So it would probably be a we take this option or this option.

Yeah, okay.

So um, so who ultimately has authority kind of to say yeah, this is a no-go besides the town on the signal?

On the connection, like at any point if they're like this floodplain doesn't meet the signal doesn't meet requirements road.

Do you know who who would be able to say yeah, some of the other constraints?

I think the the floodplain uh analysis wouldn't uh necessarily be uh strict yes or no, it would be uh you have to do but yeah, you need to mitigate X, Y, and Z.

Possibly you have to additional items beyond that with FIBA.

Um, I think it certainly has a risk.

Um it's possible they could say no, but more likely there would be some form of mitigation.

It's just a question of how much does that cost and what does that look like?

Um similar with with CDOT.

Um, I think it's you know they there's alternatives.

Maybe they're not as appealing as they they might be, depending on what CDOT requires.

Um, but again, it may not be uh uh only no, there might be ways to address it.

You just may not have the project as originally uh envisioned.

So I'd see those two as the main.

Um again, also there's the potential for um environmental impacts with Cole Creek.

Again, those are mitigations, potential additional costs, not necessarily no, the project can't proceed.

Okay, and then what about the FAA?

Uh in the FAA side with both of these alternatives were outside of the runway protection zone.

So we don't see um an FAA issue.

Okay, um they may have feelings about it though.

And they're and they might require things like fencing and things like that on the airport property side and so forth, but nothing that we would anticipate would be a hard no, you can't do this.

Okay, just uh know that you're gonna have to spend a lot more money from the last cases.

And put an airplane on the side of the bridge to make them feel better about so uh you mentioned about uh private land for islands.

Is it any estimated map cost on um I don't know in terms of yeah, like per acre cost of the failure?

Like a model but I just wanted to add the dumb one for the I I would say on that I don't know if we want to get rid of this, but I uh the bigger thing is that with the the project that's going on there, you mentioned it's entitled, and and that's goes right through their phase three uh development.

So I I don't think they're I mean, whatever the number is, I don't think it matters because I I don't think they were interested in entertaining that.

So I want to shift focus to the economic uh side of this.

I'd like to have Julian uh come up and I may invite uh David Nasser is here.

Uh David owns the land that this road would potentially uh go through.

Um but let me start with uh question that uh Julian.

So uh Julian, you just introduce yourself and your important role for this.

Oh, sure, why not?

Thank you, Mayor.

Uh Julian Jackwin, Towns Economic Development Director.

Thank you.

All right.

Um one of the other items that this came to be to even consider this was um economics along a new road here.

And you know, what does that mean?

And it doesn't look like any of that was factored in.

If I understood the economic number, it was simply what was already in the airport, and you didn't see putting the road through increasing or decreasing really any effect.

Is that right?

Correct.

Okay, so then um I think my first questions to the consultants here why wouldn't you see more traffic counts going through that development as generating more revenue?

Yeah, and I think that that is a good question.

A lot of times when you have more um volumes and more traffic by a development, you know, in theory, there's there's an economic benefit to it.

I think part of the the uh reality is just where this road roadway is located.

Um, so it's you know, that's one key component.

Another key component is a lot of the the airport area.

You know, we have the development that's adjacent to alternative B there between alternative B and airport drive on the screen.

It's already entitled, it's already going in.

The new roadway doesn't necessarily make that development more enticing to build, it's already you know in process from that standpoint.

So your professional judgment is that a development on a dead end is equally viable as one that has traffic counts that goes through it all the way.

Well, part of the part of the question is also access with these roadways here and where alternative B is compared to that development, you have quite a bit of difference in elevation.

Yeah, but a lot of that benefit comes from improving access to those developments.

Yeah, and these alternatives just in their setup don't do a lot for for access um to the uh private property that's located here.

Interesting.

Okay, and by the way, I'm only talking about alternative A at this point.

Okay, because of the signal and everything else that we were talking about before that.

Okay, so back to Julian.

Um if this road were to go through, I think one of the we've never spoken about this.

I don't think we've had any kind of conversations as a council.

Um the traffic that would come up through here.

Is there possibility to create another URA and create another economic zone that doesn't exist today, or is that it's really not enough to that we should care about?

Yeah, sure.

I'll come at it from two ways.

And John, would you mind just going back to kind of the one that shows Alt A and B?

It's Lloyd zoomed out, maybe, but yeah, that works.

Um so to come at it the first way, as far as development potential in this area, regardless of alt A, Alt B or any of it.

I think the two locations that have the most economic potential that were included in the um benefit cost survey are uh in two locations.

One being the terminus of Arapahoe Road accounting line, which is the 7M owned property, which we've all envisioned for the potential future roadway entrance to the airport.

That's been a priority of the advisory board since it started six years ago.

Um when we did the most recent airport economic development strategy document with the advisory board now, almost a year and a half ago.

We were looking at potential ways to generate more revenue for the airport.

Um, and that included not expansions of the airport, but expansion of uses to benefit the airport.

This was one of those properties.

So this is what we call the westward expansion option.

And that location included retail, flex industrial space, airport-related office uses, those that would benefit from airport adjacency, um, but are privately owned, privately developed with real tax-based dollars benefiting the town.

Um that was studied conceptually uh to just kind of quantify what the economic benefit might be of development in that location.

Uh, it's not an actual development plan.

There's no proposal, there's no developer, it's on privately owned land.

We just wanted to look at economic potential of what development in that location might look like.

Um the road, the the proposed North South Connector Street doesn't impact that development, doesn't impact that site.

It doesn't really activate or disactivate that potential of that property for development purpose.

It was just conceptual, and I think one of the numbers included in the study was 350,000 square feet of commercial space at that location.

It's a number that was used in an impact study, but but not really anything that has real math behind it.

Uh and then the other one, I'm getting to your question quickly.

Um, the other one is what we've talked about with the NASA project.

The number that was used in the study was 322,000 square feet of commercial in their PD and their planned development.

That doesn't mean it's planned development, that's just part of their zoning.

And the 322,000 square feet is the total footprint of both phase one and phase two of their business park.

So that's already existing, already constructed first phase of the five buildings that already exist, plus the new five buildings currently out of construction.

So that's already happening irrespective of the road.

Um, so long way of saying those two development areas and the economic output identified in the the slides around what that could generate are absent, really anything to do with this road.

So all that aside, um financial wise.

If development occurs in this area, neither of these properties, none of this corridor is currently within the boundary of any kind of special financing district.

There's no URA here.

There is a URA on the airport property itself, and there's an air, there's a URA on the what we call Sierra Vista property down on Colorado 7, closer to Bonanza.

Um, not generating any money, no developments occurred there.

So it's a URA that's been in place for 13 years with a zero balance because nothing's happened, so no money exists.

That does provide an opportunity to consider a new URA along this corridor.

Doesn't currently exist, so we could go through the steps we've done with gateway phase one and town center as of last year to uh look at the feasibility of a new URA plan area for some portion of the County Line Road Corridor.

Um as development is considered with the NASA properties included, the 7N properties included, and so on, development potential there, if in a URA could generate significant property tax dollars, sales tax dollars captured by our URA to finance things like this.

To create a URA, there's a lot of steps required by state statute.

You have to meet definition of blight in the state statute, uh, negotiate with all the taxing districts, but that I think here there's about nine of them, um, and basically go and ask each taxing district to agree to share back some part of their revenue that we then capture through the URA to pay for things like this.

Um, and then ultimately go through the steps with notifications, public hearings, and approvals.

So could we for sure, but there's a lot of steps that go into it.

Yeah, if a URA were here, yes, development could generate revenue that could be used to potentially pay for something like this.

Would the um current waste management truck facility would that be considered blight?

There's 11 criteria in the state statute.

Um, deterioration is one of them.

There's also unsanitary, unsafe conditions, defective lot layout, um, environmental uh issues.

It requires hired third-party consultants that are smarter than us to run those field work condition surveys to determine based off state statute.

If the area as a whole meets blighted area, not one it doesn't help if any one parcel within the area meets the state definition, the entire area as a whole has to.

So they would do their survey and figure out based off the parcels, the conditions, everything they know, would it meet?

And that's up to them to help us figure out.

Yeah.

Just like town center was determined blight.

Um, and some people would look at that and go, How could you consider that blight?

Um and all the garbage trucks, maybe isn't blight.

Who knows, right?

But it's it'd be something that we'd have to go through.

Yes.

Um okay, and then I think I would like to bring up um David Nasser, who uh owns that property.

Um because this could have an economic impact one way or the other.

So if you want to come up and just talk, uh yeah, I think Jeff was actually with me too.

Uh, what do you want us?

So wherever we can figure it.

Okay, sure.

Hello, everybody.

Quick question, just uh for Dave.

Did I'm just curious.

Did um did the traffic study consider when you closed uh county line, the impact on um Cole Creek not opening yet?

That was planned, and it was planned to be constructed in phases, right?

So yeah, so it did take that into account.

No, I just meant the data, like what happened to that traffic.

You closed one road, but you didn't open the other yet.

Well, we still have Monroe, which is opened, which has the same amount of lanes as the previous existing coal uh uh county line road.

Okay.

So basically Col Creek was open before County Line was shut, correct?

Yeah, that's yeah, yeah.

Right.

So that was more curiosity, but all right.

So the real question for you is you've got your third phase of your development that's right in this area.

Um what does this do to you either way, right?

If we don't put the road through, if we don't move forward, what does that mean?

And if we do put the road through, what does that mean to you?

Well, for Zach's our CEO, so I'm gonna let him start because he works in this kind of data more than I do.

So you go first.

Um, I think a few things there.

You know, we've been working over the past five or six years to put infrastructure in airport drive.

Um, and you guys have been down there recently, a lot's going on.

Airport drive is essentially been ripped up, new water sewer infrastructure has gone in.

That infrastructure was put in with the idea of serving two parcels, lot one, which is under construction now, and what we call tract E3, which is the piece of property where that alternate A dips in all the way to highway seven.

So the impact of timing is important on us because those infrastructure infrastructure dollars have gone out, and in order of a in order for us to recap that cost, E3 needs to keep on a schedule.

Um potentially that could be worked out with the town where maybe there was an alternative to sharing some of that cost.

From a commercial perspective, I think it's a little different than a residential one where traffic generation is good for us.

I think this could be an interesting gateway to the town that doesn't cut down Cole Creek.

Um, I think it could be a very appealing way to get into town where it has a mix of commercial uses, and I think we could see a benefit from that.

Our biggest concern is timing and delay on projects.

Um I think that would just take a bigger discussion.

Um, if property was taken out of E3 for the road construction, because we have gone through a pre-app.

Um of that land has been allocated for parking and some other things, but if that could be traded in for other development parcels along that road, we would be open to it.

I think there's a lot of moving pieces, and our biggest concern is we're not delayed into you know a 10-year process where we can't monetize this infrastructure that is being dug up and put in the ground, you know, as we speak.

Yeah, so this is always the balance, right?

You know, I often look at these decisions as 100-year decisions for the town, right?

Because you missed the opportunity today and it's gone forever.

No different than open space, right?

You missed the opportunity today and you build on it, that's gone forever.

Um I want to focus on one thing you said, and that's the economic opportunity to you.

Um I just want to make sure I understood what you said.

It sounds like if the road goes through, that is better for your development from an economic perspective.

Am I summarizing that?

Or is it well?

I I think a lot of the development that um you see kind of falls under a destination kind of a concept.

So you know, people would come there for a purpose, like if it's a medical facility or a surgical center or something like that.

Um I don't think that's traffic driven, but so it's hard to define uh what the impacts are based on the usage.

I think that's a big one.

Um I think the gentleman mentioned about access, that's that's incredibly important with trucks and things of that nature.

So I think that's a big unknown.

What would happen if a road went right by us?

How would you turn in?

Uh, how would trucks operate?

What this is a little bit more you know, macro, so I put Zach on first, because he's he's really good at detail.

Um but little things that add up to big things, like and Dave, this is just a question.

But in our development agreement, we talked about the traffic uh trigger, and there's it's a little different, and I think there's so much going on that we gotta all communicate like tonight, which is great, but the actual trigger is the fifth building, it's not a traffic metric.

Um C dot gets the final vote, but there was actually two phases within lot one.

So I'm gonna pause you for a second to give context.

Yes, you know exactly what you're talking about.

I know what you're talking about.

I don't know that everybody out there that might be listening knows.

So this is the second phase that you're building today.

That is not the land that this road potentially would go through.

But the why it matters is because the fifth building, which is the last building, correct?

Yes, that triggers the signal having to go in.

Exactly.

All right, so then that's the context.

Yeah, and thank you.

And and and this is meant with complete respect for staff.

I mean, there's a lot going on, there's a lot to read, but that impact is you know, got a ripple effect, if you want to call it that, whereby you could start phase one, build four buildings, your economic, you know, opportunity of the project as a developer is X.

But if that trigger doesn't get triggered, and the fifth building doesn't get built, you're just in this spot where you're stuck with that fifth building.

And you know, I think most people know that developers generally do best at the end of the project, you have to front run all the money, and that's why the timing is so critical.

And so when you put the uh the sewer, the water in the street, and you put the underground utilities in, that money is dead money until you stand a building up, and and it's that time when the money comes back.

So it's a it's a really complex um you know, three-dimensional chess game with how the market works, how banks work, how they underwrite your banking, um, and any uncertainty, anything that gets in the way of that, and certainly a last building, that all has a really difficult effect on the developer.

The reason I brought up the example of the fifth building wasn't as much literal, although it's valuable, it's communication.

I think if we talk about these impacts to the development side, bring it into the room like we did tonight, and and I appreciate the invite.

I think everybody starts to understand that it is a partnership, and and I think you know, I've heard this tonight many times about you know the developer is doing this or might do that.

We are that developer, we we we live here, our headquarters is here.

Um, we're not building and and leaving.

So we just want to kind of open the dialogue around these all relate to each other.

It's not just a road, it's not just the access, it's not the traffic count, it's a big picture, and you gotta kind of think of it that way.

And I think when you silo the discussion into you know any one subject, and no one does that intentionally, it's just because it's busy and we're all thinking and there's so much to do, but it is complicated, and and so once we pull the trigger on those public improvements and we spent the money.

Um, without the unlock of that that second phase or track E3, which is the land that this road potentially could go through.

Yes, it just completely uh has it's like a 99-arm monster, and when you move one arm, the other 98 move a little different, and you gotta kind of anticipate that, and it's complicated.

So that uncertainty really you know gets us nervous.

So my whole point is we're open-minded to anything that makes sense.

We just have to make sure that it's just not sidelined into a road discussion.

It really has to be looked at holistically, and and if we could bring that thought um together, then I think it just opens up lots of actually it opens up opportunities.

What I've learned in business is that most problems become opportunities, and if you think of them that way, which we do, uh I think we can solve lots of these things together.

I agree the North South Road has to happen.

I liked your idea when we talked about it initially.

I I gave it a nickname.

Uh it's going on the record now.

We call it more roads.

Um that's the insights we're going to do.

But but it's a good idea.

And I think you know, if we could be part of it, um and whichever options chosen, I think it it'll work great.

Just seems to be the low-hanging fruit is that the first alt zero or O is ready.

And this seems like why not evaluate what happens?

Because then you get empirical data.

You get real traffic, you get real impacts, you get real behavior.

And everybody starts to go, oh, well, I didn't expect this, but wow, this is what's happening.

And you get to learn a lot.

Seems to me that would be a great first step without closing the door on other steps.

So maybe that's the way we approach it, where we keep the optionality there.

Um, but we get alt O started.

Yeah, and alt O is going.

I mean, that's that's going, yeah.

I don't think anything we've said tonight, I'm just looking around the table.

It doesn't stop that from being built out and getting the curve to go.

So you're not stopping.

And just one last comment, and and I I appreciate the chance to speak.

I think if um what what probably should have happened um is that before the public improvement of driving uh utilities to our site, we probably all should have made sure those entitlements were done before that happened.

But that's not what we did.

We we ended up, you know, civilly engineering uh the improvement to the site, approved it, built it, and now we're not done with the entitlement.

So when this discussion comes up, we're like, oh my god, what's happening here?

We just ran all these utilities to the site that may be impacted.

So I feel like we just got to flip this back the way it started.

Let's get this entitlement done.

We did make a pre-app, like Zach said.

We did present, but then you know, when these concepts come up, um, maybe I'm wrong, but it feels like the brakes were just slammed on to that process, and that costs us money.

So it changes our uh our sentiment to the project a little bit.

I want to unwind that and make it positive.

So I came tonight just to say a few words about that.

All right.

So what I'm hearing here is that um you're I'm sorry, what is the the nomenclature using for the third parcel, alt D something?

We we call it track E3, which is what it's currently track E3, yeah.

So, and there's just a pre-app on that.

I'm looking at Sarah over here.

So you guys haven't actually filed an app on it at this point, is that correct?

We we would have, but you know, the process um you know got um maybe called in the question is the way to say it.

Yeah, so it seems to me.

Let me try to throw something out and we'll see if we have general support.

If we don't, we don't, we'll try something else.

It seems to me that um this road connection is not gonna go through unless we get that point four or five ratio up to a one-ish.

And so there's been some ideas thrown out, right?

On well, what numbers did you use to actually create that point four or five?

And they seem extraordinarily high.

So I certainly want to see that data before we just scrap this uh to make sure it's it's it's real in the context of this.

Um, but I think we also move forward with the app on this property, understanding that there may be a road there or there may not, and then we can look to Sarah and team to help us understand what the what the trade-offs are there, right?

Could you possibly develop that third track so you can recoup your sunk costs, but the road could still go through in the future at some point, or is that ridiculous because of other costs and it doesn't work?

I don't know, but that's the kind of stuff that I would want staff to weigh in on.

And then if the alternatives to try to make this go just are simply the numbers will never work, then I think we also have to ask the question that came out clearly in the survey, and that was the traffic growth and infrastructure are the top concerns of our residents, and they're repeatedly identified as traffic congestion, road conditions, and over development as urgent challenges.

So I don't want to just ignore what came out of the survey and not do anything, right?

And so that's why I don't want to quite give this up yet until we've explored all options to see if it's economically feasible.

And I like this, sorry.

I might have one thing just to keep in mind long-term planning is yeah, even if tomorrow you decided you want to build this, yeah.

You gotta fit it in the CIF.

Well, and that's so there's how much what are you gonna not do?

What I mean, there's triple effects.

So just the budgetary, I mean, to Mr.

Nasser point on delay.

So we can build a town for 90,000 people and ignore the traffic concerns, the small town feeling.

Because it's hard.

No, because we have to do prioritization.

You're gonna have to trade off what you want.

The easy thing to do at this very moment is just to say, all right, forget it, we're not gonna do it.

We're gonna live with the traffic, we're gonna live with whatever.

And that may be where we end up.

I just until we totally understand the true costs.

I don't want to say no at this moment.

So I will if the majority do.

So we think you got some really smart people on staff.

Um listen, we love big ideas, we love more ideas because people do better collaborating.

Um that's our company culture.

You know, we're a family business, but we we collaborate.

Um I'm all open to talking about track D3, and we we did that once with the uh with the the pre-app.

It's a five, it's a five-building array.

Um we did a lot of work on that, you know, with traffic counts and making sure that all those other metrics have to come together so it's viable and it and it does check the box, which you know, unlocked the go forward on the public improvement of the the sewer and water.

But honestly, the good news is this is the property I like to talk about.

The problem that becomes an opportunity.

I think we're early enough that we can sit back down with Sarah and her team.

Uh, who I'm gonna say again are outstanding, they have just some great ideas, and we go, wow, we didn't think about that.

That's something we should.

So I think we're wide open to sit down and talk about it again.

Um, we have to develop it, but the how could be could be solved and maybe leave the optionality of that future rug.

I mean, we're we're here to talk about getting through it.

All right, so go ahead, counselor.

Thank you.

Um to kind of circle back to the idea of ignoring traffic and design.

I I think that is um that's that's not the case if we don't move forward than this.

In fact, this feasibility study is showing that um, you know, a 0.5 K reduction in traffic on Vista Parkway, which was the excuse for looking at this.

It shows that it's not really impacting travel time.

So this is not the solution we're looking for, is what I'm hearing.

Um, it's also creating impacts for our developers.

I remember last year early in the year when came before us with an amendment to the PD for, I believe was it tracked?

Was it that tracked?

Um it was to renegotiate the cost share agreement for that public infrastructure in airport drive.

So included in that was don't put in the the traffic signal on Colorado 7.

We're not ready to do that.

That was your you suggested that.

Don't put in the traffic signal.

Yeah, you said don't do that, delay that as long as you can because we want to look at a connection through here.

I never said delay a traffic signal on highway seven, never said that.

Okay, well, go back and look because I was upset that that was because someone had died recently, right?

Yeah.

Um, and so well, what I'm saying is that the feasibility study is telling us that this is probably not the solution that we're looking for for the problem for the traffic congestion and connectivity.

So our team or our transportation division is tasked with creating those solutions.

And I think that while we thought of this idea, this isn't that um, and so it's expensive, it doesn't serve the community.

Um, it doesn't address the survey results of wanting to reduce traffic congestion or that connection.

Um there's no safety benefits.

Um so for those reasons, I feel like this is not something we should spend more staff time and more town money on.

Yeah, we already spent money on this uh researching solutions that I wouldn't step on that.

And the reset too high the risks are high, yes.

Just one more comment on the traffic light.

Um most developers don't volunteer to spend whatever it's gonna be a half million dollars for a traffic light.

But um, this is not good negotiating, but um, I gotta credit staff for bringing it up because when we went back and said, wow, what does this mean?

Is it just money?

When you start to amortize the cost of that over our project of 300,000 square feet ish, and you realize call it the marketability of telling your people that it want to rent or buy from you and and and bring their business here with those jobs, um, how much safer it'll be.

Um, you realize it's worth it, you know.

So, you know, I think that's kind of the stuff that I guess what I'm trying to say is I wish there was more collaboration back and forth.

It seems like the processes, you fill out an app, you do a pre-app, you have a good conversation, but it just never seems like we get into a good business discussion.

I can promise you good would come out of that.

Um, not every developer saying we don't want to spend any more money.

Good developers believe that spending money makes money because your project's viable to the people that are gonna buy those buildings uh or units, and having a safety factor of getting into the the project with the traffic light is is a pretty good sales tool too.

So just you know, points for maybe thinking about.

We're not opposed to spending money when it makes sense.

So at the stakeholder meeting, um, or the community meeting, uh you had brought a couple maps with you.

Would you be open to to I mean I can shoot?

Brian you took a bunch of I didn't bring them, but I'm just saying like it brought up something different than what we're seeing here.

You feel comfortable having that shared.

I do.

So if I if I remember the map correctly, if you go to slide A8.

Uh it's gonna be easier to do this.

No, okay.

There's uh alt A.

There.

So the other drawing that he brought was to basically bring the road this way and connect here.

And yes, I know there's hangers there, but they may not always be there.

That distance would be a lot shorter to cross that floodplain, which might dramatically reduce that cost.

Not dramatic.

I don't know, maybe it was, but it wouldn't, wouldn't it reduce the cost of that bridge?

It would be shorter, yeah, it would be shorter.

If you were able to travel, say from where that station says 10, the 10 zero zero.

Okay, if you're in that area, that is that is shorter.

Okay, um, so that there would be cost.

But yes, as you noted, it goes through the hangers, and so that raises a question of what happens to those.

Is there a cost to the town to for those?

What does that become?

But if that were to happen, would that stay away from your E3 development, right?

So that wouldn't have just adjust the northern end of it.

No, he's right.

Yeah, in theory, it would.

Uh, I think it's also a straighter line, but I know there's a lot more data to to crunch before you know there's any clear answer, but it is a concept.

And do we need a rule of other no so those are privately owned hangers?

The the concern is that those are privately owned hangers.

Yeah, no control over that property.

So there's dialogue in the business world that happens, and um you know, I think my thought is that opening up alt-O, which is happening anyway, is gonna uh satisfy a lot of immediate need, you know, traffic is gonna flow.

Um it creates time and it gives other people the opportunity to maybe think about it more in the private sector.

Uh and that's that's a concept.

Um we bought a lot of land from the gentleman that owns it, he's a perfect gentleman, great guy.

Um the buildings are old, very old, and I think there's a discussion there, but there's there's no promises to that.

I just think that it's worth exploring, and there's time.

So um maybe there's an opportunity that way.

I think if that were to if those if that land were to become available and there were no longer a private business there, I think that that is a reasonable discussion.

I just I don't feel right planning for someone else's future in the process.

Neither do I, by the way.

So um, it's a concept in the sense that there's time, but that's why thinking thinking uh kicking it down the road a bit would be a prudent thing to do, and maybe thinking about how the access points onto E3 uh they should work with the current concepts that we're talking about and future concepts.

And I think if you can check both boxes, that's the optionality.

I always try to explain.

Yeah, we did have a purchase option on those hangers that expired, so I think that proves desire and motivation of that gentleman.

Um, you know, he is getting older and managing that complex is you know, we've discussed that it's becoming more burdensome for him.

So I think it all starts with desire.

It seems like a bit of that is there as far as like an economic driver if those hangars did become something that were a little more economically productive than what they're being used for currently, and having a road alignment that services that I it seems like a good idea, but um again, it's negotiating with land that is none of ours.

So Julian's comment on the URA.

I mean, again, we never thought about that.

Um, I thought that was a tremendous thought.

Um how that works, we can't speak to.

That's inside your tent, but um, I think that time gives you the ability to explore ideas like that, and and we're game to play along, and we do have a relationship with the gentleman.

We bought land from them already.

We did have a um a right of first refusal.

Uh we haven't pursued renewing it just because we're busy, but I think there's a dialogue there.

Uh, but we can't certainly make promises.

And Dave, you're right, we shouldn't plan around it.

Um, we should explore it.

Uh maybe I can add something.

Sorry, can I just yeah, sorry?

Uh we've been talking about um this kind of from an idea of traffic and uh traffic mitigation, but uh, I want to ask you guys why you're here because this is a major employment center for the town, and so I've kind of looked at this a little bit differently, and that um you know, we right now to get in there, we've got one and gross eagre to get out of there off highway seven.

We're gonna have some improvements there.

And um, thank you for all the work that you've done out there, and and uh but having the I guess the potential for having uh a north entrance and into that area, does that helpful for you guys from a business perspective?

If there's uh you know, people potentially, and I know a few that work in that area that live in the north part of town, and instead of having to go down to highway seven, and I mean, I would do what you did.

I would hire experts and understand roads um better than we do.

But you know, seemingly if that um design of the road is contemplating how people get off the road to go to those businesses and use the example of a surgical center.

I mean, just explain that.

One idea I have with that ridge view, which is amazing uh on top of that ridge, and you know, if I was gonna get my meniscus work on and I was gonna sit in the back patio and stare at the mounds, that wouldn't be a bad way to heal.

Um, how do you get off the road to go to that surgical center?

I just think that has to be answered.

Okay.

Um to bring that thought together.

But if that can be answered well, um, then I think yes, it's an absolute benefit.

Yeah, I I do think with our current phase, it's a little bit more complicated because just with the uses we're currently entitled to have, yeah, they're really restrictive on like publicly facing or publicly active uses.

You know, we have a crossfit gym.

That use is kind of really restricted in RPD.

Yeah, um, so they're more like destination type stops where you either have a business there, you know, you're running your contractor shop out of there.

So I think road connectivity is a little less important for those uses.

But if they were expanded to allow for more publicly facing uses, I I think it would have a huge benefit.

Yeah.

And that's where I think you know um the planning department, you know, suggested that we uh do a PD amendment right after we finish the entire process of getting the approval.

But I have to admit it was a good idea.

And I had we contemplated that first, sure, that'd have been better.

But um to go out to go forward and build you know an expensive project when there's a better idea, you're better off just saying, hold on, let's do it.

And I think that's the point that Zach's making is that those uses being defined, uh, how cars get off highways to get to those you know, public facing opportunities.

That's all part of the discussion.

But you know, in concept, I think you could you could check a lot of boxes with the right road.

Um so I always did like the concept, yes.

Um I I think it has merit.

So if um if it's okay, I'd like to add something real quick.

So we did as part of our outreach and engagement also meet with the airport board, and we wanted to ask some of the same questions around uh the interest uh from that group related to employment, related to the operations of the airport, truck traffic, other things that are important as part of this conversation discussion.

Um the feedback that we got was a little bit more defined compared to the feedback that we're receiving tonight, which was we see a security threat with a roadway going through, and part of our process was to make sure that we're not a impacting any private property or buildings, and B that we would also consider the feedback that we're getting as part of the uh uh stakeholder group that that's meeting with us either in the community meetings or through the the board themselves.

So we we have brought forward basically what alternative wouldn't have as much impact to private property owners that would actually work through the available right-of-way and has the smallest amount of footprint or cost perspectives.

Now, if we're talking about development and other alternatives and options, typically what we do is we do allow developers to propose options to us with their development related to their trip generation, and there's a whole nother process for that.

That's a traffic impact analysis, that's a development project.

That's that's not a I'll say town-led you know, uh roadway capital improvement.

That's more related to basically what's on site, and we we evaluate that a little bit differently given that there's private property involved, there are dedications involved, there's other kinds of trip generation, and a lot of the um regulations associated with like traffic signals from CDOT and all that jazz is the same process no matter which one you look at.

We're we would have to do it just as much as the developer would have to do it.

So I just want to put that out there because I think it's important to know that we intentionally tried not to uh buy someone's property and and look at alternatives that would impact any buildings, have any adverse impact, and then we try to also be sensitive towards what we heard from uh the public and from the airport board about security and and all that kind of uh uh issues.

Um, and then just one more thing related to uh the traffic and feedback that we've heard from the public and how we're approaching the greater growth because I I do believe it's important to hear what our constituents are saying, how they feel about traffic in their neighborhoods, how the growth of the town is managed from a demand perspective.

We actually we actually have created a digital twin of our roadway network, and that allows us to modify and and uh see model what a roadway connection here and there would do when we get proposals, we put that into our our operational model.

Um what we found from our analyses is that highway seven is really where the impact is for investments.

If we're if we're really seeking to have a uh positive impact for commuters for those that are trying to get around uh the highway has a lot more of compared to local roads that that serve within like the neighborhood areas.

This kind of goes back to how we evaluate our our network and how we want to balance that.

Uh connectivity is obviously part of the process.

It's important to have those connections.

Access is a major issue with our developer community.

We manage that as part of this process, but there's a reason why the old county line road is diagonal to the Cole Creek over there.

It it never crossed, and it's more cost effective where it's at in that alignment.

So I just want to put that out there because I I do think it's important to note that we are listening to the growth-related traffic-related issues.

There are plans for improvements, obviously, to help with those, but it's kind of like a balloon.

You squeeze one side, the other side kind of kind of pops up, and then you squeeze the other side.

The and so the question is where do you want to see that impact?

It's a trade-off.

I just had one last thing.

Um the low-hanging fruit, in my humble opinion, is that the uh the hangars on the airport.

Um I sat through the economic um airport economic development committee presentation a few maybe four weeks ago.

Um that's a great team working on great ideas.

Um, but what I didn't I did not hear is um as deep a conversation on the the hangers on the airport, which I think is an immediate economic unlock for the town.

Yeah, Zach and I have been flying our whole lives.

We know airplanes, we we understand that I gotta stop you on this because we also have rules we have to follow on the topics we talk about.

Sorry, I don't know.

We start to go too far off the road, which is really the topic tonight.

Um we'll have another opportunity though to I think all seven of us have a desire to get more hangers and all that just for the public record um to help um with that.

I mean, I still see this um option as an opportunity, you know.

It does show we reduce the traffic through park now by almost 50 percent that improves the safety.

We can keep the trucks out of that neighborhood, you know, they're going by that school um by getting them to go down this this uh uh road uh as well.

Uh so I do see this as a potential safety improvement for that neighborhood.

Uh also you know reducing the the you know, having the traffic uh as well.

I'll and that's the other reason why I want to see the numbers of Vista Parkway before and after County Line Road, because you know, whether it increased 20, 30 or 40 percent on this to parkway, um seeing it only drop by half a percent.

Um I I want to dig through that and understand that you know much better.

Miguel did pull those up while we were while we've been talking, by the way.

Um so 2015 prior to county line, well before county line road uh was at 5500 ADT.

Um we saw a little dip with COVID, um, and then 2023 after Cole Creek Boulevard open, um it was at 6500 ADT, so thousand ADT 15 yeah increase roughly and what's kept what's the capacity design?

18,000, yeah, something like that.

So well within the limits.

Yeah, hold it 18.

Oh, right.

Wow, you could triple the traffic on uh Vista Parkway, yeah.

It's the road diet not necessarily the goal we're shooting for more so.

We got a more hundred mail address here theoretically what do we expect the traffic count to go up on Vista Parkway with the addition of Red Tail Ranch and those hundreds of homes?

I don't know that right offhand.

You don't just carry those numbers around your head.

It used to be able to retain a lot more information, now it's just so much coming in now.

So have your hair too.

Yeah, well, that was gone before.

Now it's just starting to turn gray, so it's all good.

But you know, I don't want to impact any of the projects that are going on, you know, currently those need to move forward.

And and but it sounds like you know, thanks to everybody's input and everybody's help uh tonight that you know for future there's still future opportunities.

There's a lot more work to be done, a lot more collaboration.

There's other uh property owners involved uh that that we would need to you know talk to and work with and bring to the table.

So but I like to say I still see this as a uh very good opportunity going forward with the caveat that we don't impact anything that's going on now.

So how do you do that if if it requires staff time and money?

Well, um say you know it's not part of what's gonna be worked on.

Is it part of the work plan this year?

Which will be on this level of effort is not on the work plan for this.

So I mean, we're talking about work plan next, right?

Um it's not on the work plan as of today.

Um I don't think it should be on the work plan.

I think we're talking about uh a substandard road based on our standards.

The town's very standard.

I was gonna say I'd be careful with substandard.

Well, that's what we're talking about.

I mean, Dave's gonna sign up on it.

I'm below the town of Erie's standards.

I will hire some sub-meaning below.

Um and we're also talking about this being somehow being the uh gateway to our town.

That's not a gateway, that's an alleyway, and it's unsafe because for pedestrians and bikes at a horrific cost.

Um, and to take a general theme from the town survey of traffic and um that's the word starts with the C congestion, thank you and congestion and attribute it to this small part of town when north south south access was absolutely not guidance from our survey.

They there was there was talk about the major connection points of 287 and I-25 and highway seven, but not getting to highway seven, it's once you're there.

That's the problem.

This is a solution to nothing.

I I think this should be stopped right now.

And I think we're leading on one of our developers and residents with the idea of well, something to do with E track E.

We might work something out.

Uh with this is this is gonna be years and years and years in the works, just getting approvals through all the things.

I I think it would be a Travis need to spend any more time on it.

So I'll shut up.

Okay, if I may, with the with the traffic counts that we have right now, and kind of responding to the traffic volume question.

Maybe right now we spend the time collecting the traffic counts on County Line Road.

I never missed the parkway and Col Creek Boulevard right now, before the Colbury Boulevard fully opens, just to see what traffic looks like right now, because this is a huge investment.

So we can take the next year to collect that data, see what that looks like and what the traffic flow is going to look like when Col Creek Boulevard opens.

Um we can at least spend some time there, so it's not a lot of staff time, but um something to get going and um have some kind of database of what traffic looks like right now and um when Cobra Boulevard opens.

Yeah, so I I like that as an option.

I guess um I recognize that this is a long shot at this point, and to your point, I don't want to spend a bunch of staff time chasing a long shot.

Um on the on the flip side of that, it's one of the small things we can do to at least get a bit more information.

I like the traffic counts.

I really want to understand the cost.

Why the costs are double what it appears they should be, right?

And then I also want um uh the NASA development corporation to figure out whether this is something that is beneficial or not by doing the application.

Um that doesn't take any more staff time than it would take anyway to go through the process, but it doesn't shut the door on this, it leaves it just cracked open a little bit in case the traffic counts, the um there is economic value that we can't articulate tonight, that there is a uh less expensive way to do this, especially if a deal could be struck to um get through the private land that was avoided in this analysis in the first place.

Um I don't agree that uh this isn't this wouldn't fix a problem.

I mean, I go back and I've got it up in front of me right now.

Traffic growth and infrastructure are top concerns, residents repeatedly identify traffic congestion, road conditions, and overdevelopment is urgent challenges, intersections like Arapaho Road, Highway 7, County Line Road, were frequently mentioned as problematic.

And so, would it solve all the problems?

No, and I'm certainly supportive of the Sheridan uh north-south connector.

Um, so hold on, let me let me just finish my thought.

I'm not supportive of the bonanza drive.

I've lived that life once before, I have no desire to live that life again.

Um so really we got to find these ways to get the north-south and you know, Sheraton, I think would do a big big jump as well, especially as growth happens to the east and has to find a way down.

Appreciate all the thoughts.

We have to move forward with our projects.

Um we want to be team players with the concept, but I've got to put it in concept category and optionality, and yes, we'll listen, but um our money's out, our projects are deployed.

We have to stand buildings up, otherwise we just bought some expensive water sewer lines that we don't get the the utilize, so that doesn't make any sense.

So yeah, climbing is critical to us.

Yeah, totally, and that's why I think having you work with staff to figure out what works for your development and then help us understand that.

I think that's an important piece of this.

Um Mayor Moore, I did want to follow up on a question that we have regarding um Erie Parkway bridge over Cole Creek, the span, the cost of that.

Yes, this is a question I asked before the meeting.

Just what did the bridge cost, which is our last big bridge that we built in Erie?

Yeah, so those are from 2018.

It was a 225 foot span bridge.

Um that was four lanes across.

And at the time, it costs 2.7 million.

If I were to take that number from 2018 and apply a pretty standard construction cost escalator of three percent over those eight years, we'd be about 22.2 million dollars for a 225 foot span bridge.

So four lane or two lane?

Four lane.

So if I were to take that number divide it by two and times it by four, which is about the difference between this span and the span for um this alternative A concept, it would be at about 40 million.

Yeah, interesting.

Okay, if you can send me those numbers too, yeah.

Yeah, I guess I would have asked since it's a study session and we can't give her action.

That's right.

You can take feedback.

Um have the next steps for keeping the traffic counts up.

Um are there other next steps that there's an interest in staff taking that or not?

Um not staff.

I think well, I think I'm looking for um the NASA's to figure out what they need for that, where this road potentially goes through.

And if you come back, you say it's it doesn't make economic sense.

Okay, fine.

And then the other thing that I would like is just to understand the numbers behind the uh that's that's uh and then you know that leaves the door open about this much, but I recognize that it's not likely gonna happen.

Unless somebody else has another um, I mean the traffic counts.

I think what Miguel said that'll help maybe we don't have a problem, right?

18,000 cars on Vista Parkway.

I'm not advocating that very clear that's the PASIC plan.

I also wanted to add that uh from the survey, it could have been a that's part of the time was closed, and it is problem, but they don't know the before and after data, and they don't know the fact that we have to also consider that there might be so many brands in that the only other thing that I wish would have been done was that um there was I think one community meeting the community that really is talking about this is the Vista Rich community, it's the um Vista Point community, it's the um Erie Um can't I remember the development up the road um Erie Commons, uh past Dury Commons to the left, uh Erie Village.

It's the people that are coming down south, right?

It's not just the airport and that.

In fact, they're probably the least impacted as well as Parkdale, who also mentioned it when we approved the the plot in the northeast corner.

Not that I'm asking staff to go do anything on that, and I don't think you need to have a you know a pop-up at the uh town fair to ask this question.

I think we got these bigger things that have to be worked out before we can ever consider it.

What is your timing to actually submit an app for your property?

We think we're late.

I mean, we started uh a long time ago.

We we ran a lot of the land planning.

Um we've engaged DTJ design, I believe it's done some work in the town and came up with some of those road alignments that you were talking about, Brian.

So they've been heavily involved in it.

We have essentially our master site plan developed.

We've been going through some mining, some side-in studies on that site, uh, which are turning out to be a little less impactful than we thought, which was good news.

So we're kind of ready to go.

It was are we gonna have to?

We've been contemplating a PD to get some of these more high-tech uses, which we feel like would be great for the town on that zoning.

That entails a full site plan.

So we were a little unsure if we should continue to spy spend money on a site plan that may be impacted by a road.

But otherwise, we're pretty much there.

Okay, yeah.

All right, we'll get a little bit more information back, but we're not gonna spend a bunch of money chasing anything at this point.

All right, are we ready to move on to the next topic?

All right, just to be honest.

Maybe this doesn't find us to get all.

And honestly, that was one of the race upgrades.

Start the conversation.

So I think you guys remember earlier in the year when we had some staff changes.

We have some vacancies at the moment.

And part of that conversation is we came back to you and said there's some items on the work plan we don't think we can get to given um few uh fewer staff members and some things we also needed to add based on drought.

Some things that came up we weren't anticipating.

Um so we said we bring back to you a revised work plan to look at.

I'm happy to say that Abby made it readable or Gabby made it readable.

So we now have a work plan, but it's not a spreadsheet.

Um hopefully this is a more user-friendly version of what we had previously.

Um it's also interactive and has a little bit current status on a few things we have things to see so you can click on it and learn about each other.

Um so it is not up there yet because it has not been approved by you yet.

Right, okay.

Um it is a link to it is in your packet, and then it will be on the website, assuming you approved it with the what was the question.

Is it on the website?

Uh got it.

Uh so I think you also have um you have a list of the items that um gonna be moved to 2027.

You have a list of the items that have been completed and a few items that were added.

So this does need to come back to you for approval at a meeting.

The question for you guys tonight is are you okay with the new work plan?

Is there anything that we took off that you don't want to have taken off?

Is there anything you want to add?

Saying loudly.

Um other thoughts you have before we bring it back with final approval.

I have a couple questions.

Um let's see.

The first one was the water rate study was being moved uh to twenty twenty-seven.

Oh no, then that was a list.

I think we just signed a contract.

Oh, that's the impact fee.

That's right.

Sorry, I'm getting some confused.

Okay, so we kind of need the right, I gotta be real careful here because it doesn't for the audience we've been in it.

Um I I think um this would just I think it would be if I might rudely interrupt.

No, please would be that these are our public facing priorities.

This doesn't take into account anything that has happened in executive session or is not ready, I'll say for a public level decision.

Okay, so when we have the discussion on uh May 26th with water, I just want to make sure that we have an ability to maybe do a rate study out of that discussion.

I think that's fine.

Yeah, and I'll talk to Todd and Sarah and see where they were on that and if it's something that can be added in easily or if it's gonna be part of the general competition already.

Then my second one was the prop uh one two three fast track.

I thought the law said we had to have that done by the end of this year.

Um yes.

There's no impact to us if we don't commit, number one.

Number two, there's also uh an opportunity the following year to commit to a two-year cycle.

So um it's not dire for us to complete it.

We are coming to the council and planning commission to have a conversation about that, among other things on the second of June.

That's why we're gonna do that.

So we can determine from there, just you know, is it a priority for the town to do that or not?

Yeah.

Well, and a lot has changed at the state budget with them cutting funds out of one, two, three.

And then so that yeah, this was a big discussion at CML because um uh I I'm sure Mayor Moria remember when we used to balance the budget from the the education fund or they borrow against education funds.

So essentially from what I'm hearing is the state's now doing that with prop 123 to you know, but what what are we a billion dollar shortfall or whatever?

So yeah, that's this year and another billion, I think next year.

Yeah, yeah.

So creative accounting.

So even if we pushed it forward, it may not make a hill of beans a difference because if there's no money, there's no money.

There are uh at this point, there is some money, but it's you know, I think they've cut it to half or something.

I think I read 130 million was taken out of it, and it's 190 million.

Um, so so it cut back significantly, but it's still it also said though that if you want any chance of getting any money in 2027, you have to have this done by the end of the year, I thought.

Yes, we would.

I'm not overly concerned, I don't think it's a a very complicated change for us to do.

It would affect some of our applications, but not all.

We'll go through that.

Um it's really just for all of you to let us know what the what your priority is and we'll we'll get it done.

So this one, I guess I don't want a hard pull off this year until we have the conversation with the planning commission.

Is that okay?

All right, and then uh uh last one in that section was the street renaming.

I get all the other streets, but the Erie Parkway one, this is that small section that's in the county from um it's Isabel right now taking it out.

I think I was told that was already in with the county.

I believe the application is in.

Um I think David has left.

He has the most current information.

Let me find out where that is for you.

All right, and I'm okay letting the other ones go, but I'd really like to get the sign Erie Parkway across 287.

Um can I bring this up now?

Because she didn't talk about the one was the talk of renaming something for Mayor Van Lone and the and the rec center, and I think Patrick was working on that, but I I don't know if that the road so I'll talk to you offline because I think the road was off the table, so we're not talking about the road.

The road was on the okay, and I can give you an update on that.

Okay.

Um and then on the last page, what is that section?

Uh already completed.

Oh no, it's things that you're just putting to day-to-day work development review of property in Lafayette.

I don't know if that's the IGA.

So we've that's not the IJ, that's okay.

So is the IGA one still in here?

Uh yes.

Um that's yours, right?

Yeah, that's right there at our administration manager's office.

Okay, so it never was basically.

Yeah.

Okay.

That was the one side.

Okay.

Okay.

Um I just had a question on the street light uh purchase uh conversation with United Power.

So we've already done that with Excel for much of the time.

Yes.

Okay.

It's just the next step would be um the other providers.

Okay.

But it took years.

It was it was very complicated.

So yeah, yeah, so I'm I'm I'm fine with it.

But um, so what is the development review of property and is that referring to I think that is referring to the um Tebow site and Lafayette and just development review of whatever they come up with, and because it's not really in our control, I think we just kind of push it off because we didn't think that would be on our plate.

Okay.

I think that would also be 119th and highway seven, right?

They're moving forward with that.

That's the piece that Boulder County and us were talking about could part of it be open space, but it's going through their development process right now.

Yeah, we'll respond to anything that comes our way.

So it's just that that piece of it.

Um we didn't anticipate it.

Well, and we're we're a referral agency for anything from Lafayette, but that's like that's just day-to-day regular operations.

Okay.

Yeah.

I don't may have just been pulled off because it was well, it was not day to day.

It wasn't pulled off.

Oh, it's not a work plan item, it's just a day to day.

We would have done this anyway.

Item.

Oh yeah.

Sorry.

Others updates to his questions.

So the and I guess it's already in Q2, but solar projects at water facilities.

So since we're not doing the treatment plan, is it?

As I understand this is the solar on the lake.

Oh, okay.

All right.

Okay.

Yeah, gotcha.

All right.

And then I see that county line road improvements cheeseman to highway 52 has been removed.

I think we submitted that to Dr.

Cog.

Did it get removed because actually that type of process is ongoing?

Or maybe that's it.

Maybe it's in the future.

I will um find out for sure.

Um I'm glad to see the SERPA refresh is pushed out because we've never had an IT um kind of study session, and maybe in 2027 we can do that with so much of compute going to the cloud.

Um do we need to be able to do that.

Yeah, last time I spoke with Denise, she said if we like pushing it out, it is gonna be more expensive, but it does offer a lot more options if we're gonna go cloud based.

Yep.

Well, so it's all be off the board then.

I'd be glad to come out as a consultant with the six-month limitations.

Oh, okay, all right.

All right, is that it?

Any other stuff great.

I think there's very few things here that we really had a question on.

So thank you.

I think from the design perspective, we always post the work plans on our website, and there are some residents who care.

Um, and so they'll go look at it.

And so it's nice to have the interactive version, which we've had in the past as well.

Um, that then they can click and get more information.

Most of what's in there is either links to meetings that you've had, um, documents that have been approved, agreements that have been approved, and or if we have um engagement web pages or other details that we've created, it links to that as well.

Um, so folks can get some more information while they're in the document or jump out to something.

So we we liked that idea from the public perspective, not just from an organizational and like council priority perspective.

All right, anything else?

Okay, I'll just say that uh one last closing comment.

Congressman and Naguse will be here on Thursday night.

Uh there's a free meeting at 4 p.m.

in our community room for council members, and then I think the event starts at 5 p.m.

I believe that um you have to RSB RSVP through this removable office.

Yeah, they're coordinating.

They're um limiting it to 100 people that'll fit in this room.

But whoa, we we have to do that.

No, I think we're we're invited to the four to five meeting.

Oh, okay, okay, gotcha.

Yeah.

All right, I think that's it with that.

I will adjust the study session for things.