5PM City Council Study Session @ City Hall

Meeting Agenda
Watch the meeting streaming live starting at 5PM
Attend the meeting @ City Hall Council Chambers - 911 10th Street - (map)
Send comments on any of the following topics to PublicComment@cityofgolden.net BEFORE 3PM
In-person comment is not accepted during study sessions, but you can speak when the business meeting starts at 7PM.

Tonight's topics:

5-5:30PM Parking Management
The City outsourced parking enforcement on May 1st of last year. Tonight, staff will provide an update on how the program is working. The City projects that they will make $600,000 this year on parking fees and citations. Pages 9-16 of the meeting memo lists some of the comments and concerns of downtown business owners.

The parkgoldenco.com website provides useful information as to which downtown lots are public. Several of the privately-owned lots now have payment systems too, including the CoorsTek, Golden Hotel, and Calvary Church lots, and the south end of the Foss lot. If you are a resident, make sure you have registered your cars on the website, so you can park two hours for free without checking in at the kiosk.
5:30-5:50PM Transit Services and Planning
Staff will review the current status and future plans for public transit, including both RTD services (the 17 bus, the GS bus, W Line light rail, and Flex Ride) and the Ore Cart. The smaller Ore Cart buses are funded by the City and the School of Mines. They hope to expand service to the south part of town this year, but are waiting for some federal approvals, since the expansion would receive federal funds. See the meeting memo for more information.
5:50-6:30PM Residential Sidewalk Policy
One of the City's walkability goals is to have wide sidewalks along every street. To that end, when they launched the new zoning code, they required any homeowner who increased the size of his or her house by 25% to pay for new, wider sidewalks as part of the project. They're experiencing two problems with the rollout.

First, the sidewalk construction can put the cost of the home addition out of reach of the homeowner. The memo gives an example of a 1200 sq ft house with a proposed addition of just over 300 sq ft. The house is on a corner lot and has 190 linear feet of sidewalk. The new sidewalk would cost $35,000, which may put the home addition out of reach. Some homeowners have downsized their remodeling plans, to avoid tripping the new sidewalk requirement.

Second, since this requirement only applies to home additions, it may result in short stretches of 5' sidewalks where the rest of the block has the older, 2' sidewalk. The neighboring homes may not remodel for another 40 years--if ever.

The Planning Department is considering ways to address these issues. One suggestion is having the homeowner contribute the cost of a new sidewalk to a city-wide sidewalk fund. The City could then use that fund for the highest-priority parts of town. (As described in the memo, this doesn't seem to offer much advantage to the homeowner, who pays for a new sidewalk without getting one.)

Denver, which has the same goal of building wider sidewalks throughout the city, recently enacted a new tax, where every property owner will pay a sidewalk assessment every year (typically $150), and then the city will take on all responsibility for building new sidewalks.