On April 14, 2026, the Golden City Council held a study session from 5:00 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. and a regular business meeting starting at 6:30 p.m. in City Hall Council Chambers. The study session featured discussions on a resident‑initiated managed parking request for Water and Jackson Streets and a Fire Department data analytics update on the impacts of Ballot Question 2K. The regular business meeting included public comment (dominated by bicycle safety concerns), unanimous approval of the consent calendar, four proclamations, and action on resolutions for the 2026 Comprehensive Plan, Council Rules amendments, and a drought enforcement framework.
Okay, so we are now at 5 p.m. on the April 14th study session. We have two items on our study session agenda. First item will be the Water Street permit parking. And the second item will be a presentation from the Golden Fire Department on their data analytics. To start, I know that we are all familiar, but for those who might not be, we've got Matt Wimpee, principal planner here from the city. Essentially, if I understand ask, and I'm going to ask you to clarify that you guys are presenting the public survey responses and initial parking data and analysis collected for council consideration. And can you just outline before we begin exactly what you're looking for from us guidance-wise? Sure. So we've had a resident initiator, or I guess property owner initiated request for managed parking on Water and Jackson Street. So before we go to MTAB and bring forth a formal resolution required under municipal code to establish any sort of managed parking in this area, we wanted to uh kind of uh present some information, uh additional analysis and kind of get general directions so we can know where we want to go uh with that resolution or where council wants to go with that resolution. All right. Um I'm going to assume we've all had time, but you're gonna go through and present first, right? I'm gonna do the lightning fast presentation based on the amount of comments I got pre-meeting. I assume there's a lot of discussion to be had within this half hour, so I will not uh take all of that oxygen. So um so this is an area that we have had uh uh this request as a property owner of 615 Water Street, which is the gold apartment buildings, that white roof building uh right along Clear Creek. We've got a request to establish uh neighborhood permit parking. Uh we expanded those options when we went out to the public uh to ask um uh what kind of options they would be interested in. Um so we'll present that data. So for just for kind of some background, so these areas here, the yellow uh lines, those are on street parking, all of this area is currently unmanaged. It's outside of what's called our downtown district, which is a formal definition of the municipal code that's typically tied to parking, feed and loo and other transportation elements. Um but this whole area kind of east of Washington, unregulated parking, free, no time restrictions, no use restrictions, other than Vanover Park. We say the parking for Vanover is only for Vanover park users. From a practical perspective, that is impossible to enforce. So uh there's a um within this off-street parking. There's 53 on-street parking spaces, um, and there's about a hundred off-street parking spaces that are privately managed by those property owners uh between four different properties. Um kind of the managed parking options that we put forward uh to the public. And we really when we do these surveys, and this is by far the smallest neighborhood zone that we've ever been asked to establish. You can put that on par with the high school zone, which is probably 10 square blocks, and the 9th Street zone, which is the closest one to this, which is easily three blocks by the uh eight blocks. Um we looked at basically no change, which continue to be unregulated, it's free for all, first come, first served. Uh then the second option was two-hour limit or having a city permit required. So it's basically any vehicle without a neighborhood permit, you can park there for a maximum of two hours. Uh, if you have that city permit, which is basically on par with a neighborhood permit parking permit, uh, you're not subject to any parking cost or time restrictions. The third option we looked at was a two-hour limit only. So basically everybody can only park there for a maximum of two hours. This is basically similar to what we have for on-street parking within the downtown core right now. And our fourth option was establishing a full neighborhood uh NPP zone. So that's on par with uh with primarily our residential areas that we have throughout town. I think we have five or six of these established now. Uh, there are businesses located within our NPPs as well, uh, but um, so it's usually that mixture, but say this one is probably a large mixture or a more potent mixture of businesses with the popularity of the mill. Um at this NPP, it does not guarantee that there is parking available, nor does it guarantee specific spaces are available. Uh, we do have the ability to do that, but that's typically not what we do with our neighborhood zones. We also looked at a couple of exemptions that we thought could be of value. The first one is that purple line on the east side of Parfitt Park between uh park space, uh park staff, um PD park users who are actually going to Parfit Park, but also events space. We felt that that could be potentially regulated as two hour only. Uh, and then also this is kind of what that area looks like right now. Uh, there is some ADA spaces. That sidewalk currently serves that picnic table, but the East Zone amenity plan looks at potentially improving that uh connectivity through Parkfoot Park into downtown. And then there's also uh this area, this is the intersection of water and Ford. Um generally it's a little too narrow to have parking on both sides and two-way vehicle traffic in this area.