November 2023

Hi everyone –

This past October, I gave the annual State of Superior address to town residents.  This presentation covers a lot of material — highlights from 2023 and things to look forward to in 2024.  In order to reach more people and to be as transparent as possible, I’m posting a link to the PowerPoint Slideshow as well as imbedding the video.  The presentation runs about an hour and a half, including Q&A from residents.  I also have included an AI generated transcript of the presentation below, however, it’s definitely not a perfect transcription.  But if you prefer reading, instead of watching a video or looking at the slides, it should be helpful.

I’m very proud of all that we’ve accomplished in 2023 and am looking forward to what’s ahead in 2024.

-Mayor Mark

 

Transcript of State of Superior Address:

Welcome to the State of Superior.  I’m Mayor Mark Lacis and it’s my pleasure to welcome you all here to the Superior Community Center.  With me is Superior’s Town Manager Matt Magley and we want to just thank you all for taking the time out of your busy schedules to come hear about all the wonderful things that we’ve been doing in town.  It’s next to impossible to try to compress all of the things that we did in a single year into a half hour to 40-minute presentation but I’m going to try.  Obviously we’re going to miss some things speaking for just a half an hour.  We will have an opportunity for questions and answers at the end of the program and I’ll be willing to stay here as long as we have questions that are unanswered so if you wouldn’t mind just hold your questions to the end of the event and we’ll get through the presentation.

 

One of the perks of being the Mayor and drafting the State of Superior is that I get to choose all the photos that we use and you’re going to see some models that are recurring participants in my slides.  That’s my sons Dylan and Jackson there on the front cover slide and that was actually one of the art programs that happened during covid where we had to do chalk art and they were modeling the Superior tree there on my driveway.  They’re the reason why I ran for the Superior Town board in 2016 and again in 2020.  They’re the reason why I ran for Mayor in 2022 to make this community the absolute best place to live, work and raise a family so bear with me when you see them repeatedly throughout this presentation.

 

2023 was a year of transition for Superior but it was also a year of great progress.  We emerged from the immediate disaster response of the Marshall fire and then moved towards the steady process of recovery.  We had almost all new town board, a new mayor, and a new vision for Superior.  We planned, executed, and accomplished many of our goals and I’m really proud of the year that we had.  I’m happy to report that the state of Superior is strong.

 

This is the town board.  I’m the Mayor. I was elected in November of last year and my term runs through November of 2026.  With me is Neal Shah who is the Mayor Pro Tem.  He’s actually at Everest Base Camp right now so he’s unable to join us tonight.  Yeah it’s a good excuse to miss the State of Superior.  His term runs through November 2026.  Jen Kaaoush and Stephanie Miller were also elected last November for terms running through 2026 and then Bob McCool, Sandy Hammerly, and Jason Serbu all have terms running through November of 2024.  They’re all eligible to run for re-election next November.

 

One of the first things that we did as a town board was we met and we discussed what do we really want to focus on in 2023, what are our goals, what are our priorities, how do we want to spend our limited time really making the most out of the the time and resources that we have in 2023.  And the priorities that we all agreed on as a town board were number one to continue with our Marshall fire recovery, number two focus on economic development, three to invest in our infrastructure, four environmental sustainability, and five improve our communications.  You’ll see repeatedly throughout this presentation that all of the things that we’re doing and that we’ve done in 2023 I think are related to these priorities.  These priorities kind of underlie all of the things that we’re focusing on this year.

 

I want to start first with Marshall fire recovery and talk about how that is going.  So as you all know we lost nearly 400 homes in Superior on December 30th 2021.  171 homes in Sagamore, 113 in Original Town, 74 in Rock Creek, 18 in Downtown Superior and Discovery Parkway, 8 in Coal Creek Crossing, and 7 in the Ridge.

 

Before we could start rebuilding there obviously needed to be a massive effort to remove all the debris that was caused by the fire.  Superior Louisville and Boulder County combined forces and participated in a coordinated cleanup so this is known as the PPDR, the private property debris removal program.  It was FEMA funded and led by Boulder County.  Boulder County awarded a contract to a company called DRC in February of 2022 to run the coordinated cleanup.  About 60% of Superior residences that were destroyed in the fire opted into the coordinated cleanup.  When we had originally talked to FEMA and we were kind of drinking from a fire hose in the immediate aftermath of the fire, the estimated time that it was going to take to clean up we were told 12 to 18 months before anybody would actually be able to start rebuilding.  DRC got the contract but then there was a lawsuit that was challenging that award which slowed down the process. It was dismissed at the end of March of 2022 and then DRC began their work in April 2022.  They cleaned up 566 properties in four months and their work was completed in August of 2022 and in my opinion that’s one of the reasons why Superior is recovering as quickly as we are because the cleanup was done so efficiently by DRC.  Obviously we couldn’t start rebuilding until the cleanup was completed.

 

Where are we in the recovery process?  More than 30% of the homes that were lost in the Marshall fire are already rebuilt and families have moved back home which is absolutely incredible when you think about it.  We’ve issued 119 residential certificates of occupancy and two commercial certificates of occupancy and another 43% of homes are under construction; they’re either permitted or pending.  We’ve issued 272 building permits and we have 18 that are ready for pickup or are otherwise pending.  There was an article written about Superior’s recovery which tracked how fast we were actually progressing compared to the national averages for disaster recoveries and they found that Superior is actually recovering twice as fast as the national average.  By this time next year we expect to have 75% of our families back home after the fire.  If you’re interested in tracking our recovery we’ve got a website at Superior colorado.gov community Superior recovers which shows this dashboard where you can track in real time the permits that have been issued.

 

We also issued $2.87 million in rebates so one of the first priorities of the Town board in the immediate aftermath of the fire was what can we do as a town board from a policy perspective to make it easy and economical for people to rebuild.  We knew that people were going to be staring down massive insurance shortfalls and we wanted to do everything we could as a government to make it easier and more efficient and more cost effective to rebuild.  One of the first things that we did was we waved our use tax collections on building materials and construction materials and waved building permit plan and review fees.  On average this nets about $10k to $15k per family just from Superior fees and plan review fees and use taxes that otherwise would be collected.  Following Superior’s lead Louisville, Boulder County and then the state followed suit and also waived use tax collections for homes that were or damaged or destroyed in Wildfire disasters.  

 

So what about the remaining 25%? We have reached out or attempted to reach out to all of the remaining fire survivors.  Not everybody was able to be reached.  We reached just about half of them and 50% of the people that we reached indicated that they do plan to rebuild.  But others are selling their lots and others are just taking their time; they don’t yet know what their plans are.  We’re going to monitor that closely and continue to work with all the fire survivors to try to encourage everybody to come back home as quickly as possible.

 

One of the proudest things that we have done as as a town board starting with at the end of last year on the anniversary of the fire was we are visiting with each of the families who gets their CO and for each fire survivor who receives their CO the town board members and myself are visiting them personally to welcome them back home to check in with them to see how the recovery is going to see if there’s anything else that we could do from the perspective of the town if there’s any additional assistance and just to make sure that people feel seen and heard and welcome back to our community.  It’s really been a touching thing and I’m really proud of our board members for taking the time to visit with the fire survivors on the recovery.

 

On the preparedness and mitigation side we have launched a disaster preparedness website at Superior colorado.gov ready.  We hosted 21 disaster preparedness programs.  Town staff and our elected officials all attended Boulder County’s anatomy of a disaster training from the office of disaster management and we also worked with the Boulder County Office of Emergency Management to add a wildfire warning message to our sirens.  One of the things that we heard after the fire was people didn’t hear the warning sirens – there weren’t any warning sirens that actually sounded during the fire so now there’s a warning siren that says “attention wildfire in the area be aware of your surroundings and evacuate immediately.”  We think that that’s an overdue change for our warning sirens.

 

We’re also partnering with the county and Mountain View Fire Rescue on the Community Wildfire Protection Plan which is a regional planning and implementation effort to identify and protect life property and infrastructure in the Wildland Urban interface during wildfires and the Community Wildfire Protection Plan is actually going to be open for public comment.  There’s going to be a message that’ll come out from the town and also posted on Mountain View fires website I believe starting on October 30th there’ll be a public comment period open for two weeks so keep your eyes peeled for an email that’ll give you a link to that Wildfire protection plan.  It’s going to be very thorough and robust and you’ll definitely want to take a look at it and give your input.  We’ve also been participating in the Boulder County fireshed and grasslands working group which provides input and guidance for strategic forest and grassland management projects to reduce the risks of catastrophic wildfires and this group presents at conferences and shares the lessons learned and experiences that we all gained as a result of unfortunately being in this club of fire survivor impacted communities.  Most recently they went to Lahaina and gave assistance as everybody’s recovering from the Maui wildfires.

 

So what are we specifically doing here in Superior to make our community safer and more resilient?  On the mitigation side we’ve been regularly removing dead trees and invasive plant materials which are known to contribute and fuel wildfires in parks and open space areas.  Our open space ambassadors along with the Boulder County Youth Corps have been participating in weed and tree limb removal programs and we’ve already removed 60 dead trees.  We’re expanding our mowing operations in high-risk areas and rolling out goat grazing efforts in our open spaces as well.  

 

Specifically on mowing we have expanded our mow bands from 4 to 8 ft along trails and open space fences on certain areas so facing west looking at the open space between McCaslin and the open space.  The Ridge Neighborhood and the Sagamore neighborhood we’ve expanded the mow bands to 20 feet and that’s what this picture shows there is a 20 foot mow band along McCaslin looking West.  We also are mowing the town 15 property which is at the intersection of Coalton and McCaslin.

 

This is a map that shows our expanded mowing operations might be a little hard to see but in red you can see the expanded 20 foot buffers so behind the Sagamore neighborhood behind the Ridge and then along McCaslin so that’s where we’re mowing 20 feet.  The town 15 property is shown in green and that’s a full mow that we’re doing in there also at the Coalton trailhead is where we have had goats grazing over the summer and we’re going to be bringing back those goats this winter and then along various neighborhoods throughout Superior we have expanded the bands from 4 to 8 ft.  Wherever you see the purple and then the green is 4 feet so 8ft, 8ft, 8ft, 8ft, so all these materials also will be posted on the town website if you want to take a look at this map in more detail.

 

The mitigation efforts that we’re using with goat grazing was a huge hit with the kids.  It’s also environmentally friendly and sustainable.  We’re not burning fossil fuels, we’re not polluting our air.  Goats are natural and they’re organic and they chew the weeds and really take care of our open spaces.

 

We’ve been using goats now for several years. It’s good to have them back and I’m happy that we actually have a grant to fund additional goat grazing that’s going to continue into the winter.  The Marshall fire had an enormous financial impact on the town obviously we weren’t budgeting for the worst wildfire in Superior’s history when it happened and it caused a number of unbudgeted expenses so we’ve been active in submitting grant applications for hazard mitigation including wildfire fuel reduction, hardening of facilities and infrastructure.  We are receiving FEMA public assistance grants to reimburse for damaged infrastructure and we also received $3.5M in mitigation funds from the state office of emergency management.  

 

Our fire response was also awarded several awards.  Our granular activated carbon filtration system so as everybody can remember after the fire a lot of people were complaining about smoke tasting water. We had our Town’s public works department figure out what we can do about that.  We were looking at dredging the reservoir and they came up with the idea of basically installing the world’s biggest Brita filter up at the water treatment plant and that project was awarded the project of the year by the American Public Works Association to make sure that we had safe, clean and good tasting drinking water.  We also just recently received a Metro Vision award from the Denver Regional Council of governments DRCOG which we shared with Louisville and Boulder County for the fire response as a whole.

 

Now I’d like to switch gears and talk about our Town’s finances.  This is a graph showing the town’s debt load from 2008 through 2028 so it projects into the future and as you’ll see our debt has gradually been going down.  In 2008 we were over $70 million in total debt and now in 2023 we’re under $30 million.  You’ll notice in 2019 and 2020 there’s an increase in our debt load and then it’s sloping downwards and that increase is attributable to three main things.  Number one we made the largest open space acquisition in our Town’s history with the Coyote Ridge acquisition where we purchased 182 acres up on the ridge line by Highway 128 that’s represented in blue.  We also purchased this building and turned it into a community center. It used to be a car dealership and that’s represented in brown and then we also have been doing a lot of work on our wastewater treatment plant and sewers and that’s represented by the gray there.  Over the next three years we will pay off some debt associated with the Superior McCaslin Interchange District that’s the diverging diamond project that’ll be paid off next year, Superior Metro District number one which is our utilities has some that’ll be paid off in 2025 and then we have certain open space bonds that are going to be paid off in 2026 at which point then we can focus back on to the remaining open space debt that was issued in connection with the Coyote Ridge acquisition.  Starting in 2025 we’ll just have those three remaining debts for the community center for the Coyote Ridge open space and then for our water wastewater treatment plant so our total debt right now is 27.9 million and we made debt principal payments of 2.9 Million in 2023.

 

On Monday night the town board adopted our budget.  Our Town budget for 2024 and it comes in at just under $60 million and it is broken down into four main components.  First component is the town of Superior’s budget which is $ 35.2 million, then there’s the Superior McCaslin Interchange the diverging diamond District which is 1.1 million, the Superior Urban Renewal Authority 5.2 million, and then Superior Metro District number one which is our town utilities that’s 18.2 million so that’s our water, our wastewater treatment plant, and our storm water.

 

What did we spend our money on in 2023? Well we were busy and this Town board at the beginning of the year kind of threw an audible and told our town staff that we wanted to double down on investing in our Town’s roads.  We spent a lot on our street rebuild and maintenance plan just under $7 million and I’ll touch on those projects in a minute.  I think that investment was long overdue and our staff did an amazing job making sure that project could get done in this year.  We participate in a massive water project up near Loveland which is known as the Chimney Hollow Reservoir and that project is a $750 million reservoir that’s currently under construction  We participate as a town along with several other municipalities and counties towards the buildout and operation of that facility and our total contribution towards that reservoir is $38 million.  We’re paying it over time and I think it’s 20 years – sorry it’s I think it’s 30 years yeah even better so 30 years and what we paid towards that this past year was 1.25 million.  This basically ensures that Superior is going to have enough water.  Water is obviously a scarce resource in the arid west but we’ve got a very robust water portfolio so we’re going to be able to ensure that we’ve got safe clean drinking water going on into the future.  On the Water Treatment Plant side we paid off our granular activated carbon filtration system and made some upgrades for ultraviolet disinfection at the water treatment plant so we could reduce our utilization of chlorine in our drinking water.  Our wastewater treatment plant is one thing I’ve learned from being on the board you know you think about all the the things that the town spends its money on and things that we want to do but wastewater treatment plants cost an absolute fortune and they’re obviously necessary and ours is aging and there’s a lot of maintenance that needs to be done but we’re constantly spending money on things that have names like sludge dewatering which you can use your imagination as to what that actually does and the centrifuge REM removable and air basin improvements.   We spent about a million dollars at our wastewater treatment plant. A lot of those upgrades are also unfunded mandates from the state so CDPHE comes in and says you need to do certain things but then they don’t give us any money to do it and we need to figure out how to pay for it.  We’re spending a lot of money on that.  We also made some storm drainage improvements along McCaslin and Coal Creek, part of which was funded by a grant from the US Department of Agriculture.

 

Also made various playground and park improvements.  We continue to double down in our efforts to plant more trees and shrubs and we updated our irrigation system to make it more sustainable to fix leaky valves and pipes and did some maintenance upgrades here at the community center.

 

In 2024 we’ve got a plan to continue our efforts to invest in the infrastructure of the Town.  First thing that we’re going to be spending a good chunk of money on is Rock Creek Parkway is going to get reconstructed – not fully we’re going to start phase one but that’s going to be an overdue project but I’ll talk about exactly what we’re going to be doing in a bit.  We’re also going to be doing street sealing throughout town, playground and park shade structures and additional tree additions.  We’re going to fix the parking lot here at the community center.  We’re going to complete an additional civic space in downtown Superior that is also being finished so we’re going to finish that and open that to the public in 2024.  We’re also going to do a comprehensive plan update which is overdue by a couple years.  

 

On the water side we’re rolling out smart water meters which are 50% grant funded.  This will give residents the ability to kind of track their real-time water usage.  We’re going to continue funding our water portfolio with participation in the Windy Gap firming project.  We’re going to spend 1.6 million next year we’re going to finish the water treatment plant UV disinfection upgrades, build a new water main to serve Original Town and spend $3 million at our wastewater treatment plant doing basin improvements because the state told us to do so.

 

So how are we going to pay for all of this?  This is an overview of the Superior current property taxes for a typical home.  Now obviously your property taxes are going to vary depending on where you live in town but this is kind of your average home in Superior that pays about 105 mills.  As you can see from this slide 90% of your property tax goes to the schools, the county and the fire district.  BVSD collects about 50% of your property taxes.  Boulder County collects about 25% of your property taxes.  Mountain View Fire is about 17% and then Superior collects 7.5%.  Another 1 and a half% goes to fund library services that we get from Louisville.

 

We collect 7.93 mills to get that 7.5% but the voters have authorized the town board to collect up to 12.127 mills and in 2024 the board in connection with passing the budget this past Monday has decided to raise our property taxes in 2024 to the full 12.127 mills for 2024.  This is a one-year decision that we are going to be making for purposes of funding the road construction projects that are long overdue… so what is this going to result in?  This figure also assumes no changes to any of the other districts obviously that’s not necessarily the case but that’s what’s going to change with Superior. Still with this property tax raise 86% of your property taxes are still going to the school County and the fire district.  So what does that actually translate to?  So for a $750,000 house this is about an increase in $200 in property taxes but what that will bring in for the town is an extra million dollars that we can use to fix Rock Creek Parkway.  The decision to do this again in 2025 will be up to the town board next year when we’re setting our budget.  We didn’t make this decision lightly. I know that nobody likes to pay more property taxes but when we look at the cost of road projects and the amount of delayed maintenance that ends up costing us more in the long run, and if we delay the work that needs to be done especially with Rock Creek Parkway.  This was a unanimous decision from the town board to do so and I applaud the town board’s courage in making this decision.

 

Economic Development.  We had a lot of businesses that opened in 2023.  Wayne Smoke Shack reopened everybody was really excited to see them.  They suffered a lot of damage from the Marshall fire.  They were closed for a long time because all of their smokers were damaged and they’re custom made smokers and they needed to wait for the fabricator to deliver their new smokers but they reopened in 2023.   But we also welcomed a lot of businesses and these are just the brick-and-mortar businesses.  I know that there’s also people that open up businesses and services out of their homes or that don’t necessarily have physical locations but these are businesses that have physical locations in Superior.  We had Pat’s Tap open, Bambei Brewing, Pharaoh’s Billiards, Restoration Hardware Outlet, Blue Federal Credit Union, CMG Home Loans, Curated by Paul Interiors, Toughed Love, Yo Gallery Wellness, and Facial Aesthetics.  We’re really excited to have them and all the support that they’re getting from Superior residents and the Superior Chamber of Commerce as well so go out and spend some money at these local businesses.  They’re great additions to our community.  

 

We’re excited for some new businesses that’ll be opening soon.  We have signed the first few leases in Downtown Superior for businesses and that is Boulder Baked which a lot of people are familiar with Boulder Baked. They have a bakery in South Boulder on Arapahoe and they make cakes and cookies and things like that.  So they’re going to be opening on Main Street at the corner of Main Street and Promenade in Downtown Superior.  Next to them will be Halcyon Mind and Body which is a yoga wellness spa type use and then Bigsby Folly is a restaurant and Winery that has a location in the Rhino neighborhood in downtown Denver.  They’re going to be opening up their second location right off of the Superior Commons Park and that space is going to be a pretty substantial space with an event space and a rooftop deck so we’re really excited to see all of these businesses open as soon as possible.

 

Our priorities from an economic development perspective in 2024 are going to be activating Downtown Superior.  If you haven’t gone down to Downtown Superior recently it’s really taking shape. It’s starting to feel like a real downtown with an open Main Street and an open plaza and you can finally see this all kind of come together and feel like a real downtown.  Our priority is going to be to activate downtown to make sure that we’ve got businesses that are opening up on Main Street.  We’re going to work on securing a hotel – as you know we lost The Element hotel during the Marshall fire they have chosen not to rebuild so we’re looking to secure a different hotel user.  Downtown Superior is zoned for two hotel users so if you know any hotel users that are interested we’ve got property ready for them.  We’re going to continue to work on business attraction and retention and support the development efforts that are underway in Superior.

 

I’d like to transition to our Public Works and utilities.  Our road projects as I’m sure many of you are familiar we have had a lot of work over the past several months on our roads been going on and we just wrapped the Coalton Road reconstruction as well as the Indiana Road reconstruction.  Indiana and Coalton were reconstructed from McCaslin to Indiana and then Indiana from Coalton to North Torreys Peak.  Those were full road reconstructions where we went down to the sub surface and rebuilt the roads and then McCaslin from Coalton to Rock Creek Parkway. We just performed a cape seal on that road and that should be finished this week as well.

 

Here’s a map showing the roads that we targeted so this shows in pink at the intersection of Rock Creek Parkway and McCaslin so McCaslin South down to Coalton to the roundabout we did the cape seal there on Coalton Road.  From the roundabout at Coalton and McCaslin to Indiana was full road reconstruction and then Indiana south to North Torrey Peak also full road reconstruction.  We recognized that you know this was definitely a pain and everybody who was trying to get their kids to Eldorado PK8 didn’t like all the detours but these roads were in dire need of reconstruction and I’m very thankful to our public works department for pulling this massive project off.

 

Additionally in 2023 we rehabilitated all of the alleys in Original Town which were damaged during the Marshall fire.  We replaced the roadway surfaces there and we also completed the Fifth Avenue extension in Original Town which connected West Charles Street to Coal Creek Drive.  As I mentioned earlier we did storm water drainage improvements along McCaslin and Coal Creek which was partially funded by the US Department of Agriculture.  Our public works department improved their website.

 

On our water side we worked on the ultraviolet disinfection project so this is another CDPHE mandated disinfection program and what this does is we basically we’re looking at a couple different options with our water treatment plant but the the options were add a lot of chlorine decrease the total load of water that we could actually treat or go with this ultraviolet disinfection program so that’s what we did and this is going to end up reducing kind of the chlorine taste that people feel in their water.

 

In 2024 we’re going to be working on phase one of the Rock Creek Parkway Reconstruction from the intersection of McCaslin to Pitkin.  We’re going to rehabilitate all of the streets in the Sagamore neighborhood which were damaged by the Marshall fire.  We’re going to complete a vision zero action plan to identify areas where there can be improved vehicular bicycle and pedestrian safety at roadways and intersections – and that’s part of A Safe Streets for all grant from the United States Department of Transportation.  The Public Works in parks and rec and open space departments are going to be working on the design of an operations and maintenance facility. Currently we have equipment in various different locations with no centralized hub for our public works and our parks and rec department and what this facility is going to do is give us a centralized location for all of them to store and maintain all of the equipment that we need to keep our town running and looking beautiful.  That facility will be built down by the wastewater treatment plant.  We’re also going to be working at our wastewater treatment plant on a biological nutrient removal project and you can use your imagination as to what exactly that means.  That’s also a CDPHE mandated requirement.

 

I want to talk about the Rock Creek Parkway repurposing study.  This is probably something that’s going to impact all of us the most over the next couple years.  Many of you participated in the repurposing study and that study evaluated the lane configurations of Rock Creek Parkway as well as the roadway geometry to determine whether any changes were warranted that would improve the corridor’s safety and comfort.  We looked at traffic crash speed data along the corridor and working with our consultants they performed technical analyses to compare existing and potential design configuration changes.  We also gathered a lot of community input about current and potential future uses and gave multiple opportunities for residents to weigh in and give us input about what they like and what they don’t like about the current configuration.  

 

This is a slide from the repurposing study and it found there’s a lot of stuff on this slide but basically what this slide will show is that everybody’s speeding on Rock Creek Parkway.  Everybody.  You’re speeding you’re speeding I’m speeding we’re all speeding and the reason why we’re speeding is because there’s a big slope and the road is really wide and it doesn’t matter what we do to the current configuration – everybody’s going to speed.   The really ironic thing is that Rock Creek Parkway needs work, everybody knows it needs work, there’s a lot of potholes, the road’s crumbling.  It was built 30 years ago when Rock Creek was initially built and it needs reconstruction.  We need to spend money reconstructing Rock Creek Parkway whether we make changes or not – but if we make no changes and we just rebuild it, people are going to speed more because the roadway is going to be smooth and that’s what will happen.  This slide shows that people on average are traveling about 10 miles over the speed limit.  We’ve got a lot of people traveling on the road between 5 and 10,000 cars per day and then in the school zones where the speed limit is 20, people are driving more than 10 miles an hour over the speed limit so something needs to be done to fix that.

 

This is just another slide showing that everybody’s speeding, even you.  The Federal Highway Administration has guidelines for bike paths and bike lanes and what this slide shows basically in the stars here it shows what the speeds are for Rock Creek Parkway.  At the south end of Rock Creek Parkway and the North End and so everybody is going around 40 to 45 mph.  According to the Federal Highway Administration they recommend at those speeds that you need to have separated bike lanes or shared use paths but what we have is a shared lane.  We have two lanes of traffic and then a shared bike lane running alongside Rock Creek Parkway.  As it’s currently designed, Rock Creek Parkway doesn’t meet Federal Highway Administration bike lane guidance.  From the study we gathered a lot of community input and the majority of residents indicated that they had concerns about safety, speeding and safety impacts, a desire for more safe and comfortable crossings, a desire for safer and more comfortable bicycle lanes, and a concern about the existing intersections.  But there was also concern – obviously the Marshall fire is fresh in everybody’s memories about the ability to evacuate and we heard all the stories about the traffic that was on Rock Creek Parkway.  People want to make sure that in the event of a disaster we can evacuate quickly and efficiently and talking with the Boulder County Sheriff’s Department about lessons learned from the Marshall fire, the roadway configuration of Rock Creek Parkway wasn’t the problem – the problem was the intersections back onto Coalton and the lights, the way that people were actually getting waved on that was the bottleneck. It wasn’t that the roadway couldn’t handle the traffic volume, it was just the way that people were exiting off of the roadway was the problem.

 

With all that in mind, this is the direction that the board decided on and gave staff direction to do so.  What you’re seeing here is Rock Creek Parkway currently has four lanes of car traffic and then bicycle lanes.  We’ve got 29 ft of space on each side currently – we have a 13 ft car lane, a 12ft car lane, and a 4ft bike lane that makes 29 total feet and what we’re looking at now is a 10 ft vehicle lane, a 12 ft buffer and then a 7ft bike lane.  What this will do is it will create shorter crossing distances so when people are walking across Rock Creek Parkway walking to Superior Elementary you’re going to have a reduced exposure from a pedestrian perspective in terms of the potential to get hit by a car with only one lane in each direction and in only a 10 ft lane as opposed to 25 ft of vehicle lanes to cross.  You’ll have a shorter crossing distance and less pedestrian exposure.  You’ll also have reduced speeds from narrower lanes, a buffer bike lane which will increase safety and separation and meet the Federal Highway Administration guidelines, but at the same time because we’re not actually reducing the roadway geometry we have the same geometry which will allow for emergency vehicles as well as evacuations for residents in the event of a disaster.  This project is out to bid right now for design.  We’re anticipating a contract award this December and then that’ll then get followed up with a contract award for the construction in the spring.  We’re anticipating reconstruction over 2024 and 2025 possibly 2026 – kind of depends on what the economics of the project look like.  We want to get it done as quickly as possible and as efficiently as possible.

 

Now I’d like to transition to parks, rec and open space.  We opened a number of parks in Superior and I think that our parks and rec and open spaces are probably (you know I don’t want to say that I’ve got a favorite in terms of departments here) but you know the reasons why we love this community – it’s because of our parks.  It’s because of our amenities that everybody just really takes advantage of and we’re continuing to add to those amenities.  This year we opened up Superior Commons which is a 12 acre park which has previously been referred to as Parks 1 and 2 in Downtown Superior.  There’s a new grass athletic field with lighting for organized sports, trails with creek crossings, restrooms, this fantastic bear playground with my son Jackson climbing on it – he’s holding on for dear life over there – and then we also have a water play feature and an open air stage.  This picture here shows that Superior Commons served as the venue for our first ever Summer Concert Series where we had 6 concerts this past summer which was a huge success.  One of the things I heard during the concerts was this was exactly what Superior needed right now.  Everybody loved the outdoor concerts.  The weather was great and it was just so much fun.

 

We also welcomed Miners Park which is also located in Downtown Superior on the south end of Downtown Superior kind of near the Lanterns Lane development and north Rock Creek.  There are tunnels, slides, sandboxes, and climbing structures.  There my son Dylan is trying out the Enterprise mine tunnel and they’re both climbing on the structure there so that’s also been a huge hit.  We heard a lot of people talk about how north Rock Creek there weren’t any playgrounds for people to get to and they had to walk across Rock Creek Parkway which people didn’t feel was very safe to get to Superior Elementary or to purple Park, so it was long overdue to have a park in North Rock Creek. 

 

We also reconstructed and remediated Founders Park which was damaged after the Marshall fire and we installed a new shade structure there.

 

We hosted a lot of events – Arbor Day, Bike To Work Day, Fourth of July, ChilI and Beer Fest, our summer concert series, the Plein air Art Festival, and National Trails Day.  Our events are always a huge hit.  People love them. It’s one of the reasons why we love living here.

 

Our Superior Community Center continued to be a huge hit.  We hosted 17 game nights, 14 live music events, there were close to 800 facility reservations so lots of organizations are using this – Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts.  They’re using this facility to gather and meet.  One of the things I hear constantly is what did we do before we had this space?  What did we do before the community center and I can’t even really remember.  We used to meet at the firehouse.  We had meetings at Town Hall.  Sometimes we went to Bell FlatIrons but this facility is being used by over 60,000 attendees at the Superior Community Center.  We’ve got rotating art exhibits and a lot of events – Chat with the Chief, Marshall fire recovery and preparedness programs, Superior Khandbari Sister City events, our Chamber of Commerce uses the Superior Community Center all the time.  We’ve got ukulele jams and open mic nights and a community choir and improv classes and also we’ve rolled out a bunch of senior programming.  We’ve got Euchre games and senior Brown Bag lunches here as well as taichi.

 

We’ve also made improvements to the Community Center.  One of the things that we’ve heard from a lot of people is that they want to work here, they want to use this space as a co-working space but it’s loud especially when kids are raising a ruckus in the spot so we listened and we enclosed the spot so now there’s there’s a window there and doors.  We’ve installed some whisper walls which are acoustic panels to hopefully absorb some of the reverberation there and also installed some solar film on the garage doors which get really hot in the sun.

 

Our pools and outdoor programming continues to be a huge hit.  We had over 12,000 visits to the North and South pools.  We rolled out a new event called Flick and Float where we have movie night.  Both of those sold out and then our Dog Days event ended up being a huge hit with a lot of dogs raising money for the Humane Society.  And then in our tennis and pickleball program we had 700 different participants in that and more than 21 different groups reserving our athletic fields for various sports.

 

We made three additional open space acquisitions in 2023 which preserve Coal Creek access and allow room for trail expansion.  Here you can see the properties that were acquired this year along Coal Creek and with those acquisitions we also received about half a million dollars from the Mile High Flood district for properties that were in the floodplain.

 

One of the things that I I looked at was how do we compare to our neighbors because obviously we think we’re superior but this is proof that we actually are superior.  Louisville has 32 acres per 1,000 residents of open space, Broomfield has 35, Lafayette’s coming close at 53, but we have 56 acres of open space per 1,000 residents and that’s not even including any of the open space that’s owned by Boulder County to our west or the City of Boulder.  We’ve got a lot of open space and we’re continuing to invest in our open space and it’s one of the great reasons why we love Superior.

 

Our advisory committees – I just wanted to give a brief shout out to all of them. They do so much in terms of looking at issues and making recommendations to the town board and executing on Town priorities.  Park, OSAC, CAPS, Historical Commission, SYLC – they’re doing an event just tonight watching the kids so you all can be listening to me.  Our ACES team and our Planning Commission.  We wouldn’t be able to do what we did without our advisory committees so thank you for serving on those advisory committees.

 

In 2024 our parks and rec and open space departments are going to be very busy.  We’re going to be rebuilding Big and Little Sagamore Parks as well as Children’s Park which were all destroyed by the Marshall fire.  We received about 600,000 in grants from Great Outdoors Colorado for their rebuilds.  We’re going to be rebuilding the Historical Museum which was also damaged and destroyed in the fire and then we’re going to be building out our downtown civic space hosting new downtown events and arts programming, making trail improvements to our Coyote Ridge open space, and performing open space master planning.

 

This is a rendering of what Big Sagamore Park is going to look like.  This is Little Sagamore Park and then this is Children’s Park.  I don’t know if any of you remember what Big and Little Sagamore park and Children’s Park look like but they didn’t look this good.  All this playground equipment is already on order and we’re anticipating delivery in the second quarter of 2024.  When we go to all these CO celebrations and welcome people back home I’m repeatedly hearing from Sagamore residents and original Town residents when are the parks going to be back?  People want their parks and it’s going to be just a great addition to the community to have them back.

 

On the communication side our Communications team was really busy in 2024.  One of the things that the town board said was that we wanted to increase and improve our communications and so we turned our Communications Department into magazine publishers this year with the roll out of the Hello Superior quarterly mailing.  That’s the first issue there with Ted Chavez and then that is the fall issue with Drew Vaughn’s wonderful daughter’s picture there at the rings at the Oerman Roche trailhead.  If you haven’t haven’t received the Hello Superior magazine it should be sent to everybody’s home.  It has great information about the community, human interest stories, just things about what we’re doing here in town and I think it’s a great addition.  You know it’s hard to reach people and we’re repeatedly hearing everybody’s busy, some people are on Facebook, some people read their emails, other people don’t, some people don’t like social media.  One of the things that we’ve heard over and over again is get us a mailing, get us a paper copy, something with a calendar that we can hang on our refrigerator and we can read and really feel like we’re a part of the community.  That’s one of the things that Hello Superior is bringing to Superior.  We rolled out a new program Thirsty Thursdays.  Many of you are familiar with First Fridays which is a morning coffee that we have here at the Superior Community Center. Thirsty Thursdays is just an evening version of that with adult beverages at local establishments.  It’s just an informal opportunity for residents to engage with their Town board members and that’s also been a really welcome change.  A lot of people talked about First Fridays, they say –  well I work in the morning, I can’t necessarily attend First Fridays so now we’ve got an evening opportunity for people to meet with us.  We’ve got a new community center facebook page and we also conducted a townwide survey this past year to just kind of learn what people are thinking about the town.

 

Our Planning and Building departments have been extremely busy as you can imagine.  They performed over 12,000 inspections, half of which were related to Marshall fire rebuilds.  They issued 700 permits.  About a quarter of those were for Marshall fire rebuilds and issued 250 COs.  Half of those were related to the Marshall fire as well in Downtown Superior.  I’m going to show you a map because this is going to be a little dense without it.  We issued COs on buildings 10 and 11 so that’s block 10 right there and that’s block 11 and so we issued COs for the commercial buildings right there along Main Street.  The plaza was completed and if you haven’t gone and checked out the plaza it’s really spectacular.  There’s an artificial turf field with this really impressive stage. You can just kind of imagine it being flanked with businesses and restaurants.  It’s going to be a true gem for our community.  We completed the Promenade Drive extension so Promenade drive will go all the way out to 88th which is open. The Superior community space in Downtown Superior is also being built out so that’s located right there.  Carmel, who is the developer of all of the downtown Main Street commercial core work, will be finishing their work on blocks six and seven where they’re doing rental apartments.  Central Park dog park will be constructed by the end of the year when we’ve heard from a lot of residents about the need for a dog park in Downtown Superior and that will be finished by the end of the year.  We also have a lot of residential construction that’s still underway.  Toll Brothers is working on blocks 16 through 24 so kind of this southern triangle right here.  Thrive is building on blocks 14 and 15 in this middle section here and then Remington is building on blocks 26 and 27 on the southwest corner.  This is Superior Commons where we have the bear playground and the new summer concert series in the athletic fields.  Miners Park is over here and Bigsby Folly which is the restaurant going to be located right here and they’re going to have a rooftop deck with amazing views of the flatirons.  Boulder Baked is going to be located right there and Halcyon Mind and Body will be right there and we look forward to seeing more businesses investing in downtown.

 

In addition to the Carmel, Toll Brothers, and Remington and Thrive residential buildings in downtown Superior we also have Montmere Shores.  They’re building 94 town homes just directly across the street across from Chick-fil-A and Dardanos.  Boulder Creek is building Wee Cottages.  They’re almost done with that project – that’s 58 single family homes in the Rogers Farm development across from Downtown Superior adjacent to McCaslin Boulevard near Original Town.

 

In 2024 we’re going to continue with our Marshall fire recovery from planning and buildings perspective, and continue work on Downtown Superior.  We’re expecting a mixed use plan development on the Resolute property so that’s going to be kind of the second half of the property where the Montmere Shores development is next to Flatirons’s mall on that section that’s currently undeveloped.  We’re expecting a mixed use plan development proposal there.  The Planning Commission will be working on a comprehensive plan update and we’re also anticipating our affordable housing strategic plan final report to be completed in 2024.

 

From an environmental sustainability point of view we collected over four tons of household hazardous waste and nearly two tons of hard to recycle items at sustainability hard to recycle events here in Superior.  We also did xeriscape upgrades and reduced the environmental footprint of Chili Fest by using recyclable bowls and edible spoons.  One of the things that we looked at we have solar panels on a number of town properties and we looked at exactly how much those solar panels produce in terms of our energy needs at our big users.  The water treatment plant and the wastewater treatment plant are the highest users of energy in town and the water treatment plant is 92% powered by solar and the wastewater treatment plant is 20% powered by solar.  We’re looking at how can we make that facility more efficient so we’re going to be upgrading the blowers at the wastewater treatment plant and the blowers are responsible for 50 to 70% of the operating costs at the wastewater treatment plant so the new new blowers will be 20% more efficient which should reduce our operating costs by 5 to 10%.

 

We’re continuing to implement the sustainability action plan that the town board adopted in 2021.  We installed eight floating pond islands in ponds in town which will make water quality improvements and give use for habitat for waterfowl.

 

In 2024 our sustainability team is going to be continuing to work on the sustainability action plan.  We’re going to be bidding out our Town’s waste contract so we’re going to be mindful of all sustainability measures with respect to how we recycle things and compost and things like that.  Then we’re also rolling out a beneficial electrification plan and basically what that is is figuring out how to make all of our buildings in town carbon neutral by rolling out heat pumps instead of gas powered furnaces things like that.  

 

I want to touch briefly on a couple additional items and then I’m going to be opening up for Q&A.  We had an event this past Monday night here at the community center which was not a town organized event but it was a community led event.  You can see it was absolutely a packed house related to the Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport.  The town board knows and understands and certainly appreciates all of the noise concerns and lead concerns that we’re suffering from the airport.  The town right now is continuing our membership with the Community Noise Roundtable. We’ve had ongoing discussions with the flight schools, air traffic control, the FAA, JeffCo, and RMMA leadership.  Trustee Serbu and I were recently in a meeting over at RMMA speaking about these issues and we’re going to continue those discussions to try to reach whatever compromises we can.  To Trustee Serbu’s credit who’s here tonight he rolled out and the flight schools have agreed to adopt the voluntary nighttime flight paths so this is kind of an experiment that’s currently being adopted by the flight schools that are flying over Superior at night where they’re essentially directed to fly on the north runway instead of the south runway and make their flight loops over Highway 36 instead of Rock Creek to reduce noise.  But we’ve also retained Council and the town’s going to be having an executive session at the next town board meeting with our aviation council so we can have legal advice on the multitude of issues that are pertinent to aviation matters.  

 

Lastly we’ve got an election coming up this November so we are asking two questions on the ballot question.  Number 1 is shall the town of Superior form a Home Rule Charter commission for the purpose of drafting a home Rule Charter and if the answer to that is yes who should serve on it.  We have 11 candidates we’re going to be electing nine of them so thank you to all of the candidates who have volunteered to step up to the plate to serve as Charter commission members and draft our home rule charter.  Assuming that the answers are yes that we should form this and we’ve got a charter commission a year from now in November 2024 the town will then have another election where we will have the ability to adopt the charter that they drafted, so definitely exciting for Superior’s future.  About two-thirds of municipalities in Colorado are home rule.  We’re currently a statutory municipality which means that we get our power by statute from the state legislature and the state can giveth and the state can taketh away and unlike a statutory municipality which gets only the powers that the state legislature gives to us a home rule municipality will get its powers from the state constitution so there are a number of things that home rule municipalities can do that statutory municipalities cannot.   I’m excited to see what lies ahead for us with respect to our home rule future.

 

If you are interested in contacting us our email is Town board Superior colorado.gov we have three main websites Superior colorado.gov Superior Community center.com which is the Superior Community Center’s website and then our economic development team.  Without our town staff and Matt Magley is an incredible Town manager and he leads the town staff that makes everything possible.  The town board can do what it can do in terms of directing the policies and and making decisions about what road should we repave and what park should we open but all of those words are just words and they need to be executed on and they’re executed on by our town manager and our town staff so we wouldn’t be able to do this without them.  So I’m really appreciative of all of the hard work and dedication that they give day in day out to our town so I want to give a round of applause to our town staff.

 

I was curious what’s happening with that land that was going to be the biological sciences development near Downtown.  I thought last spring but we haven’t seen anything.  I’m just kind of curious where that’s at.  The question was what is going on with the biological sciences proposal that was previously considered by the town board and then there was a suggestion that it was going to be resubmitted.  It is being resubmitted and it’s going to be considered by the Planning Commission on the 30th so on the 30th there’s a public hearing and if you’re interested in learning about it attend the public hearing, look at the materials that are being considered and then it’ll be considered by the town board in November and then December.  We’ll have two public meetings to discuss the proposal.  That original proposal was on blocks 2, 5 and 8.  Let’s go back to the map of Downtown Superior.  This is blocks 2 five and 8 and so that was the subject of the original proposal and all three of those blocks were being proposed for a life sciences use.  The town board passed the life sciences use and then there was a citizen led petition and referendum for the board to reconsider.  The developer asked the board to essentially nullify our previous approval which we did and so they withdrew the application.  They have since resubmitted and so that’s what the planning commission’s going to be considering.  I can’t get into kind of the specifics about it because it’s a quasi judicial decision but what we’re going to be seeing is on blocks two and five will be a life sciences use and on block eight will be a residential use.  The uses on blocks 2 and five I believe are three stories instead of four stories correct and the previous use was I think four stories and Matt do you recall how many residential uses are on eight yeah I think they submitted 272 units so but you’ll have an opportunity to to see more at the Planning Commission hearing on October 30th and then at the Town board meeting on November 13th and then December.

 

I have three questions real quick.  The Coal Creek neighborhood that was destroyed in the Marshall fire where is that located exactly – is that near Target?  The Coal Creek Crossing neighborhood wasn’t completely destroyed but that’s next to Founders Park kind of in between Sagamore and Original Town. When is Downtown Superior complete buildout supposed to be finished?  I think a lot of it depends on the economy as well obviously interest rates are important with how construction finishes but right now we’re anticipating the commercial core of downtown so like this section here, block six seven 11 10 and 9 will be completed by the summer of next year.  These three blocks – two five and eight, they’re pending consideration by the Planning Commission for the life sciences use that we just talked about so depending on whether or not that gets approved or not we’ll depend on whether or not they can move forward with construction.  And then assuming that they got approved I would think that the build out on something like that will be three to four years.  And there could be some pieces that like the hotel site might take a little bit longer and Toll Brothers to the south might take a little bit longer.  The original kind of contemplated timeline for Downtown Superior when it was originally proposed to the board back in 2012-2013 I think contemplated like a 25 year buildout.  

 

I have a comment when I’m walking my dog near Superior Elementary like over the bridge.  I notice the grass around there is really high and I get kind of concerned about fire mitigation around there.  Are they going to mow it more around the school?  Can you just tell me where around Superior Elementary?  You cross the bridge and then if you’re going towards the green belt area around SEL and Kyota it’s before you hit the Green Belt area to that neighborhood but it’s like the sidewalk right near the school back of the school.  Our parks department has a procedure for different types of areas whether it’s native or manicured grasses so it could be a native area that doesn’t get as mowed as often but we can take a look at that and see.  I guess it would be behind Alma.   Okay we’ll look into it thank you.

 

I was just curious about the increase in mill levy.  That’s a hefty increase – that’s about a 50% increase.  Why wasn’t that voted on and why wasn’t there more, wouldn’t that be on a ballot initiative?  I don’t believe that we’ve gotten enough communication on that’s a huge mill levy increase.  We’re becoming the second most expensive municipality in Boulder County and is this mill levy subject to change year in and year out to lessen it because again a 50% increase on top of the increase in our valuation of our homes that seems to me significant.  Also I’m glad to see my concern with the airport okay this is a focus you guys got to continue to work. You saw the outpour the other night home values are dropping on the south side of Coalton.  Real estate agents don’t even want to show homes on that side because of the airport.  All this development is great but if we don’t do something about the airport, it’s for not because it’s going to become a ghost town.  Thank you for those questions.  On the question of the property taxes Superior voters had already authorized 12.127 mills so that’s what we’ve been authorized to collect.  Over the past decades the town has voluntarily elected not to collect that full levy amount but under Taber we don’t have a need to go to the voter to ask for the authorization because the voters already gave that authorization to begin with when the 12.127 mills were originally authorized.  I understand that yes it’s a 50% increase over what we’re currently paying but it’s still a relatively small percentage of the total amount that people are paying for their property taxes.  Boulder County, the fire district, the schools that’s where 85 to 90% of your property taxes are still going.  7.5% to 11% isn’t that huge of a jump and we’re doing it because we you know I’m not going to second guess the decisions of previous Town boards but you know one of the things that previous Town boards elected to do was not collect all of that property tax money and also to kind of defer some of the maintenance on our road roads because we didn’t want to (I’ve been on the town board since 2016 so I’m part of these decisions) but we didn’t want to burden residents with massive road construction projects every year so we started doing them every other year and what that ended up kind of materializing is that Rock Creek Parkway was in desperate need of attention and we needed the resources to fix it.  One way to fix that is a temporary increase of the mills for 2024.  This is a decision that we make each and every year with our town budget.  We always set the mills that we’re going to collect and this decision for 2024 will then be revisited at the end of 2024 when we’re setting the budget for 2025 and at that point in time the board could elect to start the credit again and not collect the full amount of mills.  If we end up not needing it all one thing we can also do is if we end up collecting more then we need to actually perform these roadway projects we could either do them faster or we could rebate some of those monies back to the homeowners kind of like a Taber refund that you get from the state.  We’ve got some options.  Again it wasn’t something that we did lightly obviously we don’t want to raise taxes unless we absolutely needed to but Rock Creek Parkway needs work, we need to spend 10 to 12 million to rebuild Rock Creek Parkway and the money’s got to come from somewhere and at the end of the day.  The average home is still only about a $200 to $250 increase in your property taxes which considering the services that we get from the town I think is a good investment in our Town’s future.  With respect to your second question on the airport we hear you loud and clear.  I live south of Coalton so I hear the noise.  I get woken up by the planes that are flying at night. I get woken up by the planes that are flying early in the morning.  I work from home.  I hear it day in and day out. I feel the pain and I wish I could do something easy that would make the noise and the lead concerns go away.  It’s a complex problem. I’ll just tell you that the full board is focused on this issue that’s why we’ve retained council.  We’re looking at all available options to try to address this situation and we’re going to continue to work to address the situation but we also don’t want to promise something that we can’t deliver.  You know we don’t own the airport, we don’t control the airspace, it’s owned by Jeffco governed by federal Aviation Administration airspace so as a neighboring municipality there aren’t direct things that we can do.  We can’t tell the flight schools that they can only fly at certain hours.  We can’t tell the airport that it needs to sell unleaded fuel, we can’t tell the airport how to run their business, we can’t tell Jeffco how it needs to run its properties.  We can ask and we can try to get more aggressive with certain steps but it’s a very complex issue.  But if people have suggestions and I’ve heard a lot of good suggestions from the public, I’m all ears.  I’m meeting with residents regularly about suggestions.  I’ve heard some great suggestions.  I’ve heard some crazy suggestions as well but I’m listening to to all of them and if if there are good ideas I want to hear them so you can email the town board town board at Superior colorado.gov you can email me personally markl Superior colorado.gov you can find me after this event, you can come to First Fridays or Thirsty Thursdays.  I’m happy to meet with you for coffee and entertain any and all suggestions as to what we can do to deal with the problems caused by the airport.

 

I’m curious if there’s any update on the conversations with the YMCA about their interest in potentially expanding to Superior.  There have been some meetings and Matt I’ll let you chime in on this as well.  There is some interest that the town is not directly involved in these discussions so the YMCA in conjunction with Boulder County Housing Authority that’s one entity and others are looking at potentially building some sort of facility that would have in addition to like a YMCA facility with a gym and an indoor pool, some housing, some child care facilities over in the superior Marketplace along US 36 so near the RTD property.  Those are preliminary discussions.  The price tag that I heard kind of thrown around originally was something like $20 million so if they’re going to ask the town to come up with that kind of money I don’t know where we would find that kind of money given the demands on our capital improvement budget and just general operating expenses but there are other ways to finance these types of proposals.  There’s certainly the opportunity to go to the voters and ask the people what do you think we should do about a project like that and should we fund it out of taxpayer dollars so I think it’s all very, very preliminary at this stage and the Town board hasn’t seen any concrete proposals but thanks for your question.

 

Two questions.  One is pretty straightforward and simple right near the beginning of your presentation. You talked about the removing of trees and presumably with respect to the Marshall fire but also I’ve lived here for over 30 years and when I first moved in this was a small very beautiful community.  That’s changed obviously because of the Marshall fire but also that little thing called the ash borer which is totally devastated at the ash trees throughout our community.  You said I think you correct me if I’m wrong that 60 trees have been cut down. That’s just a drop in the bucket so what is the plan to get rid of these dead trees.  We have probably six to eight trees just on my block that are dead and behind us off of McCaslin on the slope there’s clearly dead trees.  What’s the plan to get rid of these? That’s the first question okay I’ll answer that first and then I’ll come back to you so we’ve been working with an arborist from the Colorado State University extension to do a census and survey all of the the health of the town’s trees.  We do that regularly to see we’re well aware of the ash borer and you know there’s nothing we can do to stop the ash borer.  You can kind of do these injections which will slow it down but the ash borers are coming for all of our ash trees whether we like it or not.  We are removing dead and dying trees, we’re replanting trees that won’t be impacted by the ash in the future, and that’s something that we’re working on.  Independent of what we’re dealing with with dead trees from the Marshall fire.  So some of those trees when we had the arborist looking at them we wanted to see if they would come back.  Sometimes they get charred but they’re not dead so we’re regularly looking at that.  With respect to dead and dying trees there’s obviously public lands that the town controls and then there’s private property.  We can’t do anything about dead and dying trees on people’s private property but if there are specific areas we want to know about them so let us know where you know if there’s a specific area of town property that has dead trees.  There’s a lot of trees in town and even though we’re only four square miles it’s a hard task to keep tabs on all of them so let us know where they are and we will make sure that they get taken care of.  Okay I’ve done that once so I’ll do it again.  The second question I have comes back to the Rock Creek Parkway rebuild.  I think you answered the part of the question right at the end there – how much it was going to cost and I think you just said it was 11 to 12 million to do whatever you’re going to do from McCaslin all the way down to Coalton.  It’s 10 to 12 million to fix Rock Creek Parkway from McCaslin to the 88th Street roundabout whether we make changes or we keep it the same.  It’s actually going to be cheaper with some of the changes because of the less subgrade and less asphalt for not having two driving lanes in each direction.  What I didn’t understand about your diagram there was that you talked about one lane going each way and then there was this other I’m not sure what you called it beside the bike what is that other lane for so we’ll get it pulled up alright so this is the median so this is traffic in one direction. This is traffic in the opposite direction.  Brake lights –  headlights and we have a 10-ft vehicle travel lane, a 12 ft buffer which is just striped and then a 7ft bike lane so this will enable emergency access. It’ll enable evacuation access but we’ll have vehicular traffic in two lanes instead of four.  So at the last Chat the Chief the issue was talking about road rage. You have a single lane and you have people that you know that want to move faster and realizing they’re only going to have one lane and you know Solomon was concerned about the road rage that may take place even today.  I absolutely agree we’re going too fast there but how do we handle the other problems?  McCaslin Boulevard is two lanes and handles many many more cars traveling at way faster speeds and I was at that Chat with the Chief with Sergeant Solomon and he said that if McCaslin can be two lanes there’s no reason, no good reason at all for Rock Creek Parkway to be four lanes.   Active enforcement will be one component of this change as well.  Active enforcement by the Sheriff’s Office and then similar road in Louisville was done just a couple years ago – Cherry and talking to their staff they’ve had positive impacts from that change.

 

Just piggy backing on to that as well what alternatives were considered before this was decided.  We looked at keeping it the same, we looked at I think maybe three or four different alternatives to this proposal and the consultant’s recommendation and the town board’s unanimous opinion was to go with this plan.  Sorry I’m talking about something besides doing a reconfiguration. I’m talking about what other options were considered to mitigate the speed.  We looked at a whole host of different things.  We looked at intersections, we looked at the possibility of stop signs, narrowing the travel lanes so they’re smaller so it can reduce the speed. We looked at roundabouts at different intersections to try to slow down the speed.  We also looked at installing ballards so there would be actual physical barriers either between the bike lanes and everybody else or the cars and everybody else. We looked at the possibility of actually cannibalizing some of the roadway surface and kind of expanding the green areas.  We looked at a lot of different things.  Road projects are inordinately expensive and you know the thing that I think I don’t want to speak for the entire board but what convinced me that this was the right decision was that we needed to spend the money regardless to fix Rock Creek Parkway.  By fixing Rock Creek Parkway we were going to make Rock Creek Parkway even more dangerous because people are going to be traveling faster and that we’ve got people that don’t feel safe crossing Rock Creek Parkway because it’s people are traveling so fast and it’s so wide so we needed to do something from a safety perspective to make the roadway intersections more safe but at the same time we wanted to be mindful of what everybody experienced during the Marshall fire and we wanted to preserve the evacuation access.  We needed to keep that total square footage of the roadway surface so we could fit two cars there and two cars over there if we needed to evacuate everybody.

 

Proposition HH on the state ballot – what should we know before we vote in terms of impact on Superior? I think the impact that we are anticipating if it passes is somewhere between the like a 200 to 300,000 loss for the town in terms of property tax revenues that we would otherwise collect so if proper prop HH passes municipalities like Superior we’re going to lose out on property tax revenues and it’ll hit us by about $200 to $300,000.

 

My questions about the water purchase up north.  I recently read an article about Thornton who had purchased water 20 years ago whatever and they’re now not able to get it down to Thornton so like how do we get that water and did I read it right that they’re having trouble like they have to have access over private property and all that to get the water to Thornton they’ve not been able to do that even though they had the foresight to purchase it like 20 years ago.  You’re correct – you did hear that correctly.  It’s a different water source than what the town has.  Ours is there we already have the infrastructure in place to get the water from the new reservoir to our water treatment plant so and we’ve been working on this water reservoir project for 25 plus years now so to see it actually coming online in the next couple years is exciting and it’s going to secure our water supply for for as long as we need it so it’s a good thing but you you did hear that correctly. Thorton’s having to get approvals from County Commissioners and they can’t get that and so they have a number of hurdles they have to go through.  It has no impact on us.  We got our water from the the Big Thompson project which takes water from Lake Granby and Grand Lake and then Carter Lake and then it pumps it down over the Continental over the Continental Divide and then into Carter Lake which is immediately adjacent to the chimney Hollow reservoir which is what they’re building as part of the Windy Gap firming project.  And then we take that water through a network of pipes that pumps it into our Reservoir up at the top of the hill behind the Ridge Development and then that Reservoir is then what feeds our actual drinking water to each of our homes and the piping that takes our water from Carter Lake.  Most of it’s going to be the exact same piping that’s going to take it from the chimney Hollow project so there’s just a couple additional pipes that are going to be needed but infrastructure is not the problem getting the water here.

 

I thought someone might have asked by now. I’m curious about the home rule thing and I’ve read some things about it and I would like to see something enumerated where we can see some concrete examples of what the town currently can’t do that home rule will let us do to give us an idea of whether this is really a good idea because right now it feels very theoretical and I’m just trying to see some concrete ideas of what’s that will get us.  One of the things that you’re able to do as a home rule municipality that you’re not able to do as a statutory municipality is audit businesses that remit sales tax collections.  Currently when you buy something at Costco or Target or at Safeway or Amazon your sales tax dollars are remitted to the state.  The state then looks at the collections and then sends us the town a payment for our sales tax collections.  When your home rule municipality you have the ability to audit those businesses to make sure that they’re actually sending the proper amounts which we currently don’t have the ability to do so and generally speaking when municipalities go home rule there’s usually some amount of money usually a found million dollars or so of sales tax proceeds that should have been remitted that haven’t been remitted.  There’s going to be probably an immediate windfall of some money that you already paid and that the state is rightfully or wrongfully holding on to.  Another example of one of the things that home rule can do is so last legislative session the State Legislature and the governor’s office had a housing bill that ended up not getting passed by the legislature or signed into law but what it would have done is it would have removed the ability of local municipalities like Superior to make decisions about land use in town and would have forced certain requirements about density and affordable housing and things like that.  While they were trying to do it for home rule and statutory municipalities the Colorado Municipal League which advises municipalities had a position about the legality of doing so with respect to home roll municipalities and the constitutionality of trying to do that whereas if we’re statutory municipality they certainly could do that right they could take the powers away from us.  One of the things that I think will be beneficial for the town for the future as a home rule municipality is being able to kind of control its own destiny with respect to land use decisions on a going forward basis.  I’m not an expert on home rule but kind of like those two issues are enough for me to say that yeah it makes sense. I haven’t heard of any municipality that regrets going home rule and I’ve only generally heard positive things but I know some of our attendees here tonight are Home Rule Charter commission candidates. We’ve got Mayor Clint Folsom here. Dalton Valette is here.  Anyway go ask them – they’re the experts they’re running from for the charter commission and they’ll be happy to answer your questions.

 

Any additional questions? All right, seeing none.  Thank you all for taking the time I really appreciate the honor of being your Mayor and the opportunity to speak to you tonight and if there are any you know questions or things that we can do for you, we want to hear from you and let us know how we can serve you better so thank you all for being here. [Applause]