The City Council held a workshop on May 26, 2026, covering four major agenda items: an overview of the city's communications and engagement program, a discussion on potential ballot funding for Lamont's Park and the Great Outdoors Water Park, a proposed update to the city's building codes, and new ideas including the formation of a subcommittee on the cemetery issue. The workshop featured presentations from city staff and extensive council discussion but no formal votes except a straw poll on the subcommittee.
Um welcome to the City Council workshop for May twenty sixth, twenty twenty six. Uh we have a few agenda items tonight, and we also will have Councillor Giannola. He did text me, he's a few minutes late, but he should be here shortly. Um we'll get right into it. Uh our first um presentation of the night is our communications and engagement program overview, and I think a presentation of our newest staff member, which we're very very excited about. Uh, I will turn it over to our deputy city manager. Good evening, Mayor and City Council. Thank you. Um, this evening we're excited to talk about the City of Lafayette communications. Um, communications is really something that's critical for the organization, um, for the community and connecting our community members to all the work that we do here at the City of Lafayette. So we're gonna spend some time this evening um going through an overview of the city's communication program and the approach, and also to introduce our new communications director. The agenda for this evening is to talk about the approach and our framework around communications. We'll talk a little bit about how we communicate, engage and listen, including the channels we use, the tools and our approaches, and then we'll delve into net next steps and questions. So we'll kick it off with a little bit more about our communications and approach and framework, and starting with an introduction to our new communications director, Aaron Frazier. We're excited to have Erin here this evening. Today is her very first day. So she's just kind of having her initiation here this evening with council and a full day today with introductions and just kind of getting settled and getting to start to know the organization. So we're really excited to have Erin here. She went through a highly competitive search here with over 158 competitive candidates. She brings more than 20 years of communications experience with CU Boulder. Most recently served as the assistant vice chancellor for constituent engagement and has a lot of other experience in various different communication roles with the CU. She's got a deep knowledge of the Lafayette community and a lot of experience with the Lafayette community as well and is a Lafayette president. So she's just on the road. So we're really excited to have her here. Welcome, Erin, and I'd love to have you share a little bit more about yourself. Oh, thank you so much. And I'm very, very excited to be here. As I said during the interview process, I think it's a real honor to get to serve the city that I love so much. I moved here in 1999, started volunteering almost right away when I got here, served on LOSAC for many years, have volunteered in many capacities in the community. I've had a range of experience from community engagement to internal communications to emergency communications at CU. So I'm excited to build on the great program and really get to know the city better from the inside as well. Thanks. All right. Okay, and I would like to talk about the communications team. We have a small but mighty communications team, and I would be remiss if I didn't start by thanking Natalie Miller, our communications manager. She has been serving as an interim communications director and has done an excellent job covering with a lean crew over the past six months as an interim community communications director, and there's been a lot going on during this time. Everything from some of the top issues we've had throughout the winter with the PSPS. You might have already forgotten about those, but right into drought. A lot of issues going on, capital projects, working on the capital bond project all through last year. And so Natalie and Sebastian have really been keeping things going, and we're really grateful for all the work that they've done. So thanks very much. A little bit about our communications team. Well, we have a small team in the communications department. We have a communications manager and bilingual communications coordinator here with Erin. And we also have a citywide communications team, which is comprised of the communications experts and staff that work within the departments across the organization to help contribute to our kind of communications bandwidth across the whole organization. So other department heads across the organization also oversee dedicated department outreach staff, and those come in different forms, whether it's sort of more of a marketing type staff or an outreach staff, or someone who has a sort of lesser amount, a small maybe slice of their position might be dedicated to communications. And it look it comes in different forms. And so those folks kind of they kind of roll into the citywide communications team and all work together to create sort of what we strive to have aligned and strategic communications effort across the entire organization to have internal and external communications out to our community and here within the organization. So I'll just say a little bit about the communications capacity across the city, and then I'll turn it over to Natalie here to talk a little bit more about the work we do. These are some of the departments, most of the departments that we have.