[BoulderCouncilHotline] Request to modify council retreat agenda

[Benjamin, Matthew]

Hello Hotline readers,


As we head into our retreat tomorrow, we wanted to give a head’s up that we will be requesting a different focus for Day 2 of our agenda, to focus on strategic conversations centered on two critically important and pervasive issues impacting our community. We have heard loud and clear from the community that the issues of Homelessness and our planning/permitting processes are not meeting our collective expectations. It is also important to recognize the immense amount of work that each of these city departments are doing in responding to these issues. We are grateful to have such skilled and committed staff. There is common understanding from staff and council that these issues have been years/decades in the making and require multiyear strategies to collectively strengthen our community. This proposal is in no way intended to interfere nor change the work plan of staff between now and when the next council is seated. Rather, these strategic conversations are centered around setting up our community for long-term success. The following ideas and concepts are merely a stepping stone from which we look forward to hearing more ideas and perspectives from our council colleagues and the community.


Homelessness

The situation of unsheltered homelessness has not markedly improved during our council tenures. It is a dire situation with ripple effects on many community members, and as such we believe we would do well to spend our retreat time discussing this issue more holistically and directly. Currently we have a study session scheduled for April 13th to discuss our homelessness strategy. Embarking on this comprehensive issue now will be a great opportunity for us to further refine our conversation on the 13th.


While we support the day services work plan item, we also believe that we should have prioritized at our last retreat the idea of convening stakeholders around the issue of homelessness in our city, and potential responses in Boulder. We understand that we lack staff capacity to tack that item onto our work plan at this juncture, but we think it should still be possible to hire a consultant with national expertise to conduct stakeholder engagement and advise us on how we can best move forward in keeping with National best practices.


With our goal of using retreat time to discuss this pressing issue, we wanted to share a few articles and links that we hope you will find valuable.



  *   The humans, and the underlying toll homelessness takes on humans, are sometimes lost in more academic or policy-level discussions of homelessness. We found this recent article to be a potent reminder of the humans and humanity that are at the heart of our discussions: Denise’s Last Days<https://slate.com/technology/2023/02/trauma-aware-care-homelessness-hope.html> (Slate), by Lori Teresa Yearwood.



  *   While we may not agree with every word, nor where this Resolution lands in every respect, we found this Resolution<https://cao-94612.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/Encampment-Management-Policy-88341-CMS.pdf> from the City of Oakland, CA intriguing. We would welcome a frank Council-level conversation that acknowledges the realities of camping and plans for these realities.



  *   We are inspired by the visionary interim housing solutions being implemented in cities like Mountain View<https://www.mountainview.gov/depts/comdev/housing/homelessness/project_homekey.asp> and Denver<https://denvergov.org/Government/Agencies-Departments-Offices/Agencies-Departments-Offices-Directory/Department-of-Housing-Stability/News/Council-Approves-Safe-Outdoor-Space-Expansion>. We believe that adding in a targeted, more interim-housing focused component to our homelessness strategy (such as manufactured housing on city-owned land) could be a helpful addition to our support options. But given the rapidly changing landscape, and the intense constraints of staffing shortages in our HHS department, we think hiring a consultant (and grant writer, if relevant) to help us figure out how to implement next steps could be useful and help us address this urgent need more timely. Furthermore, there are existing and new state level funding sources that we can leverage to help us attain a better grasp on these issues.


Therefore, our proposal for the retreat agenda is to prioritize time on day 2 to discuss the issue of homelessness, encampments, possible paths forward, and the possibility of hiring a consultant to help us along on that path. We hope to have your support in prioritizing this topic for fruitful discussions at the retreat.


Planning and Permitting Processes

It is critical we acknowledge the great work and performance improvements that have been and are currently being implemented within the Planning & Development Services Department. We also recognize that this department has had a particularly hard time hiring back a full team that was crippled as a result of the pandemic budget cuts and furloughs. With that said, we are eager to work with our director of P&DS (Brad Mueller) and his team to evaluate the areas we can improve and transform our processes to meet our community’s expectations. We basically want to create the space to ask “how can City Council help?” Any and everything should be out on the table. Do we need, for example: to hire more people; more administrative review/approval processes; code modifications to eliminate burdens on small businesses; to raise the threshold from which council has to review projects; greater incentives to streamline the process for affordable housing; etc…We hope to better understand the pinch-points, so we can try to help from the Council side, whether via budget allocations or ordinance changes.


Ultimately, we feel that the time is now to create the space, the time and the resources for us to address these two recurrent issues holistically and with a clear set of goals.


Sincerely,

Matt & Rachel



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