6:30PM City Council Business Meeting @ City Hall

Meeting Agenda
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Provide in-person comment (limited to 3 minutes) during the meeting

Note: The equipment in Council chambers has been broken, so you may not be able to watch the meeting live. They generally post the recordings of City Council meetings that same night.

Public Comment

The meeting begins with public comment. If you want to address Council, you will have three minutes to speak. Any public comments received by email before 3PM will be posted in the meeting packet after 3 (so check back then!).

Items on the Consent Agenda are considered non-controversial, not needing discussion. Everything in this section will be approved at once, with one vote.

Any councilor wishing to discuss one of the issues can request that it be removed from the consent agenda and discussed and voted on separately.

These are the items on the Consent Agenda:

Housing Needs and Strategies Assessment
This is an update of the Housing Study that Council approved in 2022. The Study was cause for a lot of public conversation at the time, because it concluded that we needed 3,100 additional housing units in the next ten years. Of those, 2,300 (or 76%) should be affordable housing units and 19% should be senior housing.

According to the Housing Study, 95% of all workers in Golden commute in. One of the drivers for that goal of 3,100 new homes was the assumption that everyone who works in Golden should move to Golden.

Since that initial housing study, the State has added new requirements, saying that about 6.4 percent of the total housing stock should be handicap accessible. The City's consultants concluded that 420-700 of Golden's housing units should be accessible.

The report states that Golden had 8,721 housing units in 2024.

The report estimates that Golden has 72 homeless residents. The State also requires that we provide "Supportive Housing" for homeless individuals. Staff estimates that we have 72 homeless residents and need to provide 55 homes for them.

The report states that households with the following characteristics may be at risk of being displaced: "Households making at or below 30%, 50%, and 80% AMI, renter occupied households, housing cost-burdened occupied housing units with annual income less than $75,000, persons age 25+ with no high school diploma, persons age 5+ who speak English “less than well”, single-parent households with children under 18, housing stock built before 1970, race and ethnicity, overcrowded, and civilian non institutionalized population with a disability" and people living in mobile home parks.

Editorial Comment:
The City has built and acquired some affordable housing in the four years since the 2022 plan was released, but this addendum does not say where we stand with regard to the 3,100-household goal. The addendum also states that employment growth and household growth have both slowed since the 2022 study was produced, but it does not provide a new goal. Are we still aiming to add 3,100 households, or is there a new target?

It appears that we still have a tremendous appetite for more affordable housing. Is there any plan to spread it out into the newer/PUD neighborhoods, or will we continue to concentrate it in the Central Neighborhoods (and apparently the adjacent Industrial School land)?

I am surprised to see this Resolution come through on the Consent Agenda. I don't recall this ever being discussed at a Planning Commission meeting, nor at a City Council Study Session. If I, a casual reader, had significant questions about the document, I would guess that those august bodies would have had more.

Grampsas Parking Lot Improvements
Council will approve a $1,388,536.61 contract to re-do the parking lot at Tony Grampsas Park.

Streamgage
Staff is asking Council to approve a $16,000 expense, recurring annually, for a gage on Clear Creek that collects hydrologic data.

Cost Estimating Services for the Lena Gulch Project
Council will approve a $174K contract with a consultant who will provide independent cost estimating services for the Lena Gulch project.

Presentation of National Community Survey Results

The City does a survey every two years, polling a small, statistically valid sample of the population to see now the City is doing. Staff will present the results tonight.