All right, welcome everyone to the April 14th, 2025 meeting of the Lafayette Downtown Development Authority.

I am Bridget Keating, the city's economic development director, and I'm gonna be opening up the meeting, and we'll start with a roll call.

So I'm gonna read all of your names and just say here.

So Commissioner Barnes.

Here.

Commissioner Kagan.

Here, Commissioner Hardy.

Here.

Commissioner Hubbard.

Here.

Commissioner Lacko?

Here.

Commissioner Mundine?

Here.

Commissioner Rogers.

Here.

Great.

We are all here.

Next on the agenda is I'm gonna open up public input.

If there is any member of the public that would like to speak.

Should I go over here?

Yeah.

Hi everyone.

My name is Adam Gianola.

I live at 311 North Cherrywood Drive.

I've been a citizen of Lafayette since 2006.

I'm currently a member of the Sustainability and Resilience Advisory Board and was a member of the Waste Reduction Advisory Committee since I think 2014 before that merged into the Sustainability and Resilience Advisory Board.

I'm just here to listen mostly and kind of learn about what the downtown development authority is going to be doing.

I'm here to also let you know that the Sustainability and Resilience Advisory Board is available for consultation as needed to answer questions and give input and guidance on issues surrounding sustainability resilience as it pertains to development downtown.

I'll stick around probably for most of the meeting tonight and just mostly listen.

Thank you.

So we also are on Zoom, and I don't see any members wishing to join for public input.

And there's no one else, so I'm gonna close public input.

And next on our agenda are a bunch of presentations by me.

So the theme of tonight is foundational since we are this is our first downtown development authority meeting.

Um a lot of these are just the legal requirements for setting up this authority.

Um and so what I wanted to start with first is to do a presentation about how we got here.

Um and Faith and Joanna both were part of the working group that ended up recommending a DDA.

And um Tim Barnes also was part of that process through council, and so they're familiar with it, so feel free to jump in as I go through this if you want to make a specific point about the process and jump in throughout the presentation if you have any questions about it.

So this is just one of many times that we're gonna be talking about um what the DDA is and how we're gonna interface with it, and as I mentioned before, we're gonna have other workshops coming up about different topics.

So if we don't cover it tonight, we're gonna be covering it soon.

Okay.

So I think it's important to share the background um about why we did this project and how we ended up at this and the different options that we looked at, the different outreach and process, ultimately why we landed on a DDA, and then kind of give you a framework of the Old Town Tomorrow Action Plan, which is that guiding document.

We'll have um options for quite or opportunity for questions.

So that was created in 1999, and it's also a special district that um is similar with downtown development authorities, but their purview is blight remediation.

That is a very subjective term.

Um, and so Colorado State Statute defines what blight is, what um and what uh sort of projects that they can be working on.

So in 1999, Old Town Lafayette looked very different, and uh Laura was created, and that had a um a funding clock of 25 years, and so the the next big date is October of this past year is when the tax increment financing, which funded Laura's activities expired, and so um coming out of that in I think two years ago, we started the Old Town Tomorrow, the Laura Transition project to think about what was next for Old Town.

Um Laura was the right tool for you know two plus decades, but our downtown is a thriving, healthy downtown, and it needs different tools.

So we created this project to have three main objectives of winding down Laura's functions and then also working with different constituents and community leaders to think about where are we going with Old Town for the next 25 plus years, and then actually identify was there another special district, a financing and organizational structure to support downtown?

So I'm gonna go through how what that project looked like and how we ended where we are.

So there's been a lot of work recently within the city of Lafayette and within this community.

And so we hired a firm called Progressive Urban Management Associates, Puma, and they work with downtowns all over the country about uh special districts, creating visioning plans, determining whether they should have a downtown development authority or urban renewal.

And so we were really excited to work with them.

And when we started this process, we didn't want to start over from square one and start going into the community and asking them, you know, what are you interested in or where do you think we're going?

What we wanted to do is first build off of every all the work that's already been done.

So we started this process by looking at the 10 adopted city plans that were done in the past couple of years, and so that included our comprehensive plan, we have an economic development strategic plan, the climate action plan, um, a number of them, and looked at that as our foundation, and then wanted to look at how the market in our demographic data has shifted over the last 25 years and where we see the trends going from there.

We also did a lot of work within the community to understand community priorities and values.

So we had a working group, we did round tables, interviews, we had a whole community survey.

Um, like I said, we looked at the recent plans, and we also had a project website where anyone in the community can engage with it as far as this process.