Council passing the consent agenda, which has a few interesting things on it: First, some changes to the Boulder Junction area.
30th Street from Pearl to Goose Creek (east side) Goose Creek to Valmont (east and west)
Removing on-street parking, “trees in grates” (will be replanted in strip)
Replace with 8-ft “streetscaping planting strip” and 10-ft sidewalk, protected bike lanes
Planning Board OK’d 5-0
Secondly, 2691 30th St - city purchasing for affordable housing
$4.75M total
- $2.2M already paid to seller for 2 yrs as Path to Home, winter homeless shelter will be credited to city
City owes $2.55M more
Will also allow construction of Fire Station No. 3; part of the site is needed for access
Previous negotiations “have been delayed due to difficulties in coordinating with the" soon-to-be past owner, staff noted
Thirdly, Tantra Lake Apartments (1000 W. Moorehead Circle)
BHP buying, rehabbing
185 units
$44 million
It appears TAB did not weigh in on the Boulder Junction changes.
Friend, as she often does, asks how/when council/staff can send things to TAB.
Staff, as they often do, promise to do that more in the future.
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Next up: Some updates on the city's lobbying agenda for the state leg. No presentation, but I've got a few notes so you know what Boulder is advocating for.
First up: Support expansion of behavioral health
No specific legislation yet, but Boulder likely to support
whatever gets proposed. Recommendations from a task force report introduced to the state leg.
They are as follows:
- Address the residential behavioral health needs of Colorado’s Native American Tribes. ($5 to $10M)
- Meet the needs of children, youth, and families through residential care, community services, and school and pediatric behavioral health care integrations. ($110.5 to $141.5M)
It's quite pricey: Last I checked (fall 2021) the budget was $23.5M — $11M *over* budget, primarily due to the high cost of land to build on ($9M for 2751 and 2875 30th St
That $11M is coming from the CCS extension
The new Fire Station No. 3 will have: "4 apparatus bays, administration offices, exercise, meeting, dining, and living room spaces along with bunk rooms for firefighters and administrative offices" boulderbeat.news/2021/09/21/com…
TLDR: Boulder has a lower rate of violent crime than the U.S. and Colorado, but a higher rate of property crime.
A few crimes have increased in recent years, as we'll talk about. But again: Overall, a low violent crime rate, even with the increases.
That's important bc all these graphs show an increase in crime (except for bike thefts). But in some cases, the numbers we're talking about are literally between 0 and 10, like robbery.
Judge Linda Cooke is here to give a quarterly update on the municipal court, including a super-quick run down on what muni court is and what they do. documents.bouldercolorado.gov/WebLink/DocVie…
But mostly this update is about community court: The programs muni court runs for unhoused offenders that allow them to get rid of some tickets/charges in exchange for working toward ending homelessness.
So if participants do things like: get a Social Security card, go through coordinated entry, or applying for housing or benefits, they can get their case dropped.
The city currently has a few mechanisms for this:
CAP tax (on electricity use)
UOT (originally to fund the muni but now the partnership work with Xcel)
Plus the disposable bag fee, trash tax and some $$ from the Energy Impact Offset fund.
All told, it's about ~$4M per year. But the CAP is expiring next year, and the UOT repurposing/extension in 2025.
Plus, as staff continually notes, current spending is not enough to keep up the growing realities of climate change.