The City of Golden, Colorado, City Council convened a study session at 5:00 p.m. and a regular business meeting at 6:30 p.m. on September 8, 2026, in City Hall Council Chambers at 911 10th Street. The study session (chaired by Councilor Cameron) covered the Ore Cart transit Intergovernmental Agreement (IGA) renewal and the city's overhead power line undergrounding policy. The regular meeting included public comment, council/staff updates, a subcommittee report on the third-party investigation, the Q3 Strategic Plan update, consent matters, four proclamations, Resolution 3354 (private activity bonds), and a public hearing on Resolution 3352 (Canyon View Business Park Replat C).
Note: Meeting minutes for this session were not available in the source packet. The raw transcript contained some garbled passages and name spellings; names were reconciled against the agenda where identifiable.
Almost there, everybody. Thanks, Don. Thanks. The light has gone on. It is on. So welcome to our study session for September 8th. We have two topics tonight. One of which is a review of the ORCART IGA with our principal planner, Matt Wimpey, and following that we will have overhead power underground policy. So Matt, take it away. And um I did not get a chance to ask you what you want to get out of it, so be sure to tell us right up front. For sure. So we're gonna be bringing back the IGA. It expires uh in July of next year. Uh we have the IGA in the state fiscal calendar. So we're gonna be bringing it back. It was originally four-year term, so we wanted to use this study session just to get a sense of if there's anything that council would like us to uh discuss with mines as we renegotiate that IGA. I think we're basically planning to bring it forward kind of as is and look at other potential improvements. The biggest one's gonna be probably a couple of years into this next IGA term in 2029, uh approximately when the South Golden Transit pilot that we're getting ready to start kind of runs out of funding from our grant. And similar to the revised gold line, we figure out well, what do we want to do? Do we wanna incorporate this in on a permanent basis? What does it look like? Things like that. So that'll probably be the biggest service-based change that we anticipate. But the rest of it is uh so we just kinda wanna get that feedback. So I don't have a formal presentation tonight because I didn't want to blab for half of my allotted time. Um but hopefully reviewing the materials beforehand we took a couple of things away is one, obviously the work art continues to grow. We see it as being uh successful service, whether it's serving campus with the silver route, or serving the entire community with all three routes. Uh we do this way, especially for kids and employees that are living off of campus or out of town that they're able to get in, they're connecting in from the W line. It's really providing transit connections that are proving valuable for folks. Uh I think we said we had kind of about a 16% cost increase over the last four years on average. And some of that's been driven by city requests, so we re-vamped the gold line. So if you remember four years ago, the gold line was like just ran a circle around downtown and picked up no joke about four people a week. So and now it's averaging you know 500, 600 people a week. Um adding bike racks, adding Sunday service, um, making sure that we have 88 vehicles available for all of our routes, uh kind of switching from trusting mines kids who are very smart, but switching to a professional driver core. Um and so then I think simultaneously we had those service expansions that we did, and then dealing with kind of historic gas price, vehicle cost, uh vehicle insurance, uh, some of which was driven by adding bike racks, but having those costs increase, and so the metal really tried to detail how we staff both at city and mines to try to be really good fiscal stewards of these dollars and to really maximize what we can get out of what council approved, and then having this additional requests, other things that we couldn't uh kind of cover existing funding. So uh so yeah, other than that, I think it's just kind of getting feedback on if there's anything that council would like to see as we bring forward the IGA, probably spring-ish next year would be my guess when I'll be back. Okay, any questions or comments for staff to help them with the better even IGA than we've seen already. Yeah. I have a lot of zinc. Yeah, I'll just start with one of them, and say it's my last one. Uh so I was looking at the graph, it looks like actually Patty has it up. It looks like we have a a dip, and this is on the packet in ridership during the summer months, but that actually is our busiest tourism months, I guess. Has there been any consideration to using this more for marketing to tours? I know we can't differentiate right now, but yeah, so I think integrating with Google Maps and Transit app has been a really good way for folks who are doing trip planning, and we've shared that data. Uh it's basically just like a data tool that we have a back end. We've also shared that with Dr. Cog for their way to go trip planning app. Uh, for folks that do look at that as an option, obviously. We've talked with Visit Golden as well, uh, to highlight that this can be way away as well to come in uh town on a weekend. Uh if folks want to take trips, there's obviously connections are kind of around camp uh around cities as well.